Building & Publishing

Building & publishing

The standards compose: skills that build servers

The mcp-server-dev plugin is three composing skills that interview you (what the server connects to, who uses it, how it authenticates) and then scaffold the right deployment shape:

> /plugin install mcp-server-dev@claude-plugins-official
> Build an MCP server for our internal weather API

Deployment shapes it chooses between: remote HTTP for cloud APIs (zero install, OAuth works), MCPB bundles for local machine access without runtime setup, stdio for prototypes.

This is the course’s full circle: skills encode the expertise, MCP is the artifact, plugins distribute both.

Publishing to the registry

The MCP Registry holds metadata, not code: your package still lives on npm, with an mcpName field tying the two together:

npm publish --access public     # package.json carries "mcpName": "io.github.you/weather"
mcp-publisher init              # writes server.json
mcp-publisher login github      # device-code flow
mcp-publisher publish

Verify:

curl "https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io/v0.1/servers?search=weather"

Tip

✓ Checkpoint for the course. One question now routes everything: which layer does this belong in? Build commands → AGENTS.md. A review checklist on request → skill. Org-wide conventions → plugin. Reading tickets without copy-paste → MCP server.

Homework: three steps that compound

1. One AGENTS.md on a real repo (twenty minutes)
2. One skill from your last real code-review correction
3. One MCP server from your copy-paste audit

In that order, this week. The anti-goal: installing ten plugins you never open again.