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MCP Gateway Setup#

This document describes how to install and prepare the MCP Gateway for local development.

Prerequisites#

  • Ubuntu 22.04 (other Linux distros may work with small adjustments)
  • Internet access to GitHub
  • sudo privileges to install system packages

Installation Steps#

# 1. Clone & enter scripts
cd <your-workspace>
git clone https://github.com/IBM/mcp-context-forge.git mcpgateway
cd mcpgateway

# 2. Run the setup script
scripts/setup-mcp-gateway.sh

What the setup script does#

  1. OS check Warns if not running Ubuntu 22.04.

  2. Python 3.11

  3. Checks python3.11 on PATH

  4. If missing, runs scripts/install_python.sh (must exist)

  5. System packages

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y git curl jq unzip iproute2 build-essential libffi-dev libssl-dev

  1. Clone or update repo

  2. On first run: clones at commit 1a37247c21cbeed212cbbd525376292de43a54bb

  3. On subsequent runs: git fetch && git pull --ff-only and optionally resets to that commit.

  4. Virtualenv

  5. Creates (or optionally recreates) .venv using python3.11 -m venv

  6. Activates venv and upgrades pip, setuptools, wheel

  7. Python dependencies

  8. Installs editable dev extras: pip install -e '.[dev]' (or falls back to -e .)

  9. If present, falls back to requirements.txt

  10. Environment file

  11. Copies .env.example → .env if no .env exists

  12. You must review and edit .env for credentials, ports, etc.