Umbraco announces the beta release of the Developer MCP Server
Cyborgs, androids, and .NET developers rejoice: you can now integrate AI into your Umbraco workflows. With the beta release of the Developer MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server, AI agents can be plugged directly into Umbraco using the Umbraco Management API.
Zoom and Enhance Your Workflow
So what does this mean for you? What can you do with Umbraco’s brand new beta Developer MCP Server? Well, the new MCP Server allows developers to use natural language prompts to complete a host of useful tasks including:
Honey, AI bricked the Content Management System
Giving your new robot friend complete, unfettered access to your Umbraco instance might possibly fill you with dread. Understandably so: we saw what can happen with a rampant AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not so pretty.
variables
While your AI agent is unlikely to do anything quite so untoward, you can imagine how a misinterpreted prompt and an AI agent with a little too much access to your CMS could be a bad combination. However, you can rest assured that Umbraco has built in robust guardrails to ensure that an AI agent can't go anywhere it shouldn't.
Intelligent Permission System
The Developer MCP Server has a very handy Intelligent Permission System which means that it respects your existing Umbraco permission model. The tools that are available to AI agents are automatically filtered by:
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Section access (Content, Media, Settings, etc.)
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Tree-level permissions
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User group memberships
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Content-level permissions
Environment Variables
In addition to the Intelligent Permission System, Umbraco have added environment variables that give developers more granular control over the specific tools available to the AI agent. These brand new environment variables are:
Tool-Level Control
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UMBRACO_INCLUDE_TOOLS — Whitelist specific tools (comma-separated)
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UMBRACO_EXCLUDE_TOOLS — Blacklist specific tools (comma-separated)
Collection-Level Control
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UMBRACO_INCLUDE_TOOL_COLLECTIONS — Enable entire tool collections
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UMBRACO_EXCLUDE_TOOL_COLLECTIONS — Disable entire tool collections
Interfacing with the Ghost in the Shell
Give it a try today! Umbraco have made it even easier to install the MCP server now that it's in beta.
Installing the Developer MCP Server has been streamlined after a migration to the official Umbraco GitHub repository. Along with the repo migration, Umbraco have also moved the MCP Server to a new location in the official Umbraco NPM namespace.
GitHub Repo
https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS-MCP-Dev
NPM Package Location
· New package: @umbraco-cms/mcp-dev
· Installation: npx @umbraco-cms/mcp-dev@beta