Agora Workbench

A workbench for wrapping your tooling with MCP

Documentation

[!IMPORTANT] Research software and support

Agora Workbench is research software and is not an officially supported Microsoft product. It is provided as-is and may change without notice. No support, service-level commitments, or compatibility guarantees are provided. Issues and contributions are welcome, but responses, fixes, and continued maintenance are not guaranteed.

Overview

Agora Workbench is a toolkit for building MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that provide sandboxed Python execution with domain-specific packages. It is agent-framework agnostic — any MCP-compatible client can take advantage of the servers created by Agora Workbench.

Use Agora Workbench to:

• Wrap domain-specific Python tooling as MCP servers — expose Python environments through isolated, session-aware execution environments that any MCP client can call
• Make tools discoverable — register tools and skills in a searchable catalog so agents can find what they need by natural-language query
• Serve data alongside code — attach a file catalog so agents can locate and load datasets without hardcoded paths
• Deploy to Azure Container Apps — use the included Bicep templates and CLI to ship your servers with Entra ID auth and managed identity

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+
• Git
• uv for dependency management
• Docker (required for the bundled container examples and local Compose workflows)

Installation

With uv (recommended for development):

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/agora-workbench.git
cd agora-workbench
uv sync --group dev  # install the project and dev tools

With pip (for using as a library):

pip install "agora-workbench==0.4.3"

The installed deployment CLI can also scaffold the standalone Activity UI:

agora-workbench-deploy init --target activity-ui

With uv, add the same release to your project with:

uv add "agora-workbench==0.4.3"

See the changelog for release history and release guide for the versioning policy.

The base install supports local code-execution servers, connectors, and local catalogs with SQLite FTS5 keyword search. It does not install Azure SDKs, sqlite-vec, or the OpenAI client.

Optional extras: