Build Your First MCP Server in 10 Minutes — Copy-Paste TypeScript Tutorial

Build Your First MCP Server in 10 Minutes — Copy-Paste TypeScript Tutorial MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets AI models call your code. Instead of copying data into prompts, you expose tools that models invoke directly. It's the difference between "here's my database schema" and "query my database yourself." This tutorial gets you from zero to a working MCP server in 10 minutes. No theory dumps — just code. What We're Building A local MCP server that exposes two tools: get_todos — Returns a list of todos from a JSON file add_todo — Adds a new todo Simple, but it covers every concept you need for real MCP servers. Prerequisites Node.js 18+ npm or yarn Any MCP-compatible client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.) Step 1: Scaffold the Project mkdir my-mcp-server && cd my-mcp-server npm init -y npm install @modelcontextprotocol/sdk zod npm install -D typescript @types/node tsx Create tsconfig.json : { "compilerOptions" : { "target" : "ES2022" , "module" : "Node16" , "moduleResolution" : "Node16"