Install MCP servers with User Scope

Problem

I understand the following command is introduced in Anthropic.

Add a user server claude mcp add my-user-server -s user /path/to/server -Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Anthropic

However, I wasn’t sure how to register MCP servers with complicated configurations. The above command means adding a simple MCP server, but even if we need to improve it more, the solution doesn’t seem to be written in Anthropic document, so we should get to know it.

Conclusion

Check ~/.mcp.json. Let’s take an example, suppose I executed the following command that registers a MCP server in User scope (I’m presenting BeehiveInnovations/zen-mcp-server as an example, but no need to use Zen MCP server, use MCP servers whatever you need)

claude mcp add zen -s user ~/zen-mcp-server/.zen_venv/bin/python

Take a look at ~/.mcp.json, yes we can confirm Zen MCP server is registered in ~/.mcp.json. By configuring this setting, Claude Code would recognize Zen MCP server with User Scope.

{
  ...
  "mcpServers": {
    "zen": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "/Users/{username}/zen-mcp-server/.zen_venv/bin/python",
      "args": [],
      "env": {}
    }
  }
}

Based on the example in BeehiveInnovations/zen-mcp-server, update the above configuration like the following one.

{
  ...
  "mcpServers": {
    "zen": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "/Users/{username}/zen-mcp-server/.zen_venv/bin/python",
      "args": ["/Users/{username}/zen-mcp-server/server.py"],
      "env": {
		"PYTHONPATH": "/Users/{username}/zen-mcp-server"
      }
    }
  }
}

For test, make a directory and execute claude.

mkdir mcp-test
cd mcp-test
claude --dangerously-skip-permissions

We can see suggestions when /zen command is entered.

Confirm /zen command works well. So yes we can add MCP servers in local scope by updating ~/.mcp.json whatever we want.