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Installation

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

These docs describe v2, currently a release candidate, so the version pin is not optional yet:

uv add "mcp[cli]==2.0.0rc1"

pip install "mcp[cli]==2.0.0rc1"

Why the pin

Installers never select a pre-release unless you name one, so an unpinned uv add "mcp[cli]" gives you the latest v1.x release, which these docs do not describe. Check the release history for the newest pre-release before you copy the line above.

The same applies to one-off commands: uv run --with "mcp==2.0.0rc1" ..., not uv run --with mcp ....

If your package depends on mcp, add a <2 upper bound (for example mcp>=1.27,<2) before the stable v2 lands so the major version bump doesn't surprise you.

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. Code that depends on mcp imports it through the mcp.types alias (every from mcp.types import ... in these docs); import mcp_types directly only in a project that installs mcp-types without the SDK.
  • 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.