workshop-mcp-servers

Workshop about MCP Servers: from building simple MCP Servers to advanced use cases for interacting and provisioning development platform resources in a self-service way. The workshop features extensively the MCP capabilities within Visual Studio Code provided by the GitHub Copilot extension, and it will use GitHub as the development platform of reference for the examples (although the same principles apply to other platforms or services).

This workshop was first delivered at OpenSlava 2025 with roots in a previous talk at OpenSouthCode 2025 along with Sergio Valverde @svg153.

Introduction and general instructions

The workshop is structured around several activities of growing complexity. To support the learning process, to simplify the deployment & execution of the several MCP servers, and to allow everyone to follow the content at their own pace at home, the solution to every workshop activity will be available in a different folder.

The recommended approach is to follow the instructions in this README.md file, and rely on the solutions available in each solution folder in case of doubts or when stuck in a given step.

Workshop pre-requisites

These are the pre-requisites for the workshop:

• Visual Studio Code
• GitHub account with GitHub Copilot enabled – free tier is more than enough for this workshop
• Node.js 24
• Java 25

The rest of stuff, such as dependencies and tools, will be downloaded automatically during the workshop and as they will not require significant bandwidth, you don’t need to prepare in advance.

We will be running MCP servers locally, so there is no need to have a cloud account or any other infrastructure/platform ready to host them. However, you are more than welcome to try them out with any platform of your choice.

The workshop can be done without Visual Studio Code, a GitHub account or GitHub Copilot enabled. You may use any other IDE and MCP client of your choice but take into consideration that they might not be supported during the workshop (that is, community-based support based on workshop participants’ know-how).

Workshop agenda

This is the agenda for the workshop:

• workshop-mcp-servers
  • Introduction and general instructions
  • Workshop pre-requisites
  • Workshop agenda
  • Workshop activities
    • 1. Introduction to Model Context Protocol (MCP)
    • 2. How to leverage MCP to interface with an internal developer platform (IDP)
    • 3. MCP server “Hello World”
      • 3.1. Node.js with Typescript and stdio
        • 3.1.1. Testing through the command line