Approval before each tool call and per-tool switches are the controls that make a local model with real tools comfortable to run — and hot reloading is what makes it usable while you are still writing the server.
An interactive terminal application for driving MCP servers from a local model. It supports the three MCP primitives — tools, prompts and resources — and gives you the controls to steer while the agent executes.
- Human-in-the-loop approval: review and approve each tool execution before it runs
- Agent mode for iterative tool execution when a model requests several calls, with a configurable loop limit and a choice at the limit — continue, wrap up, or abort
- Several MCP servers at once over STDIO, SSE and Streamable HTTP, with enable and disable per tool or per whole server during a session
- MCP prompts with argument collection, preview and safe rollback, and MCP resources for reading files, documents and structured data
- Streaming responses with Plain, Markdown, Both or Markdown-blocks display modes, thinking mode for models that expose reasoning, and reasoning effort levels from minimal through xhigh
- Fifteen or more model parameters to tune, including the context window size, plus an editable system prompt
- Server hot-reloading during development, so a change to your server does not mean restarting the client
- History you can view, export to JSON and re-import, per-query performance metrics with duration timings and token counts, and Ctrl-independent abort by pressing `a` during streaming
Python 3.11+, Ollama running locally with at least one model pulled, and the `uv` package manager. Install with `uv tool install --upgrade ollmcp` or `pip install --upgrade ollmcp`, add a server with `ollmcp mcp add`, then run `ollmcp`. Servers can also come from script paths, URLs, a JSON configuration file, or Claude Desktop's config via `--claude-desktop`, which is no longer automatic. OpenAI-compatible providers such as OpenRouter and DeepSeek are selectable with `--provider`, with the key read from `--api-key` or `$OLLMCP_API_KEY`; keys from the environment variable are never written to the config file. Non-Ollama providers are described as experimental.
One command — uv tool install --upgrade ollmcp