Envmcp

🚀 Environment Variable MCP Toolkit (envmcp)

This toolkit allows you to use environment variables in your Cursor MCP server definitions.

🚀 Quick Start

Use npx envmcp as a prefix for your stdio commands and reference environment variables by name in your Cursor MCP configuration.

You can either pass the path to the environment file as an argument...

{
  "my_mcp_server": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": [
      "envmcp",
      "--env-file",
      "/path/to/my.env.file",
      "start-my-mcp-server",
      "$MY_NAMED_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE"
    ]
  },
  "example_with_shorthand_flag_name": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": [
      "envmcp",
      "-e",
      "/path/to/my.env.file",
      "npx",
      "pull-something-else-with-npx",
      "$MY_DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING"
    ]
  }
}

... or put your secrets in a file named .env.mcp in your user's home directory, which will be looked for by default:

{
  "my_mcp_server": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": [
      "envmcp",
      "start-my-mcp-server",
      "$MY_NAMED_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE"
    ]
  }
}

✨ Features

The tool takes a shell command as input, loads environment variables from an environment file, and then executes the command.

📚 How it Works

Store the secrets required for your MCP server configuration in the .env.mcp file and use this instead...

{
  "my_database": {
    "command": "start-my-mcp-server",
    "args": [
      "My secret connection string"
    ]
  },
  "my_other_mcp_server": {
    "command": "start-my-other-mcp-server",
    "env": {
      "MY_API_KEY": "My API key"
    }
  }
}

... with this:

{
  "my_database": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": [
      "envmcp",
      "start-my-mcp-server",
      "$MY_DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING"
    ]
  },
  "my_other_mcp_server": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": [
      "envmcp",
      "start-my-other-mcp-server"
    ]
  }
}

📦 Installation

npm install -g envmcp

💻 Usage Examples

Basic Usage

envmcp [--env-file <path>] <command> [<arguments>...]

The tool will:

1. Look for a .env.mcp file in the current directory.
2. If not found, look for a ~/.env.mcp file in the user's home directory.
3. Decrypt and load the contents of the environment variable file into the process's environment variables.

Command-line Options

• -e, --env-file <path>: Specify the path to the environment variable file to use.
• -h, --help: Display help information.
• --version: Display the tool version.

📚 Documentation

Environment File Format

Each line in the .env.mcp file should be a key-value pair separated by an equal sign, for example:

MY_ENV_VAR=My environment variable value
ANOTHER_VAR=Another value

Example

echo "Write content to the .env.mcp file"
MY_ENV_VAR=Test value
ANOTHER_ENV_VAR=Another test value

🔧 Contribution and Development

If you want to contribute to or develop this project, please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md in the project repository.

🚀 Release

To release a new version, follow these steps:

1. Update the package version number in the package.json file.
2. Commit the changes and push them to the remote repository.
3. Run the npm run release script to generate a new release.