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Installation

The Python SDK is on PyPI as mcp. It requires Python 3.10+.

These docs describe v2, the current stable release line:

uv add "mcp[cli]"

pip install "mcp[cli]"

Coming from v1?

v2 is a major version with breaking changes; the Migration Guide covers every one. If your package depends on mcp and isn't ready to migrate, keep a <2 upper bound (for example mcp>=1.28,<2) so an unpinned resolve stays on the 1.x line.

What gets installed

You don't need to know any of this to use the SDK, but if you're wondering what each dependency is for:

  • mcp-types: every protocol type (requests, results, content blocks) as its own package, versioned in lockstep with the SDK. Every from mcp_types import ... in these docs is this package.
  • anyio: the async runtime. The whole SDK is written against anyio, so it runs on either asyncio or trio.
  • pydantic: what every mcp_types model is built on, plus all schema generation and validation.
  • httpx2: the HTTP client behind the Streamable HTTP and SSE client transports, with server-sent events support built in.
  • starlette, uvicorn, sse-starlette, and python-multipart: the HTTP server transports.
  • jsonschema: validates a tool's structured output against its declared output schema.
  • pyjwt[crypto]: OAuth token handling for authorization.
  • opentelemetry-api: just the lightweight API, so the SDK's tracing middleware costs nothing unless you install an OpenTelemetry SDK and exporter yourself.
  • typing-extensions and typing-inspection: modern typing features on Python 3.10.
  • pywin32: Windows only, used for stdio subprocess management.

Optional extras

  • mcp[cli] adds typer and python-dotenv for the mcp command-line tool (mcp dev, mcp run, mcp install). You'll want this during development; you may not need it in a deployed server.
  • mcp[rich] adds rich for nicer server logs.