Assembly Instructions are a real configuration language with a lot of Robots, and a model writing one from memory will get a parameter wrong. Having a lint tool next to the run tool changes the shape of that: the mistake surfaces before the encode starts. The Robot reference being callable matters for the same reason — the agent can check what /video/encode accepts instead of guessing. Decide self-hosted or hosted on one question: whether the files are on the machine the server runs on.
Transloadit's MCP server, shipped alongside its Node SDK. It lets an agent write Assembly Instructions — Transloadit's file-processing pipelines — check them before spending anything, run them, and wait for the result. It also exposes the Robot and Template reference, so the agent can look up what a step actually accepts.
- transloadit_lint_assembly_instructions — validate the pipeline before you run it, which is the difference between a syntax error and a failed job
- transloadit_create_assembly — start the work, taking input as a local path, a remote url, or small base64 payloads inline
- transloadit_get_assembly_status and transloadit_wait_for_assembly — poll, or block until it finishes
- transloadit_list_robots and transloadit_get_robot_help — discover the processing steps available and read their parameters without leaving the session
- transloadit_list_templates, with include_builtin selecting all, latest, exclusively-all or exclusively-latest, and include_content for the template body
- The server picks a safe path for URL inputs by itself: it sets the url on an existing import step, or downloads and uploads when the template expects uploads, or refuses when the template forbids overrides — rather than silently producing the wrong job
- expected_uploads keeps an Assembly open so files can be uploaded to it afterwards
- HTTP deployments expose Prometheus metrics and a public server card at a well-known path
A Transloadit account. Self-hosting is the recommended mode: run npx -y @transloadit/mcp-server stdio with TRANSLOADIT_KEY and TRANSLOADIT_SECRET in the environment, or the published container image. HTTP mode is also available, and if you bind it to anything other than localhost you must set TRANSLOADIT_MCP_TOKEN, a bearer secret you generate yourself, which protects your endpoint and is separate from Transloadit's own API tokens. If you cannot run it where your agent runs, point at the hosted endpoint instead and mint a bearer token with the CLI; those tokens last six hours. One thing that decides the mode for you: local path inputs only work when the server can read the same filesystem, so hosted deployments need url or base64 inputs. Base64 payloads are capped, hosted request bodies more tightly than self-hosted ones.
One command plus a key — TRANSLOADIT_KEY=MY_AUTH_KEY TRANSLOADIT_SECRET=MY_SECRET_KEY npx -y @transloadit/mcp-server stdio, then supply credentials