MCP Server

openbb-mcp turns the routes of the OpenBB REST API into MCP tools. Each installed provider contributes its commands, so the tool list is whatever the environment has installed.

Install

Install the server with the providers the agent should use:

pip install openbb-mcp-server openbb-cboe openbb-imf

The cli extra adds four tools that run commands through openbb-cli, locally or against a remote openbb-api server:

pip install "openbb-mcp-server[cli]"

Start the server

openbb-mcp

The server listens on http://127.0.0.1:8001/mcp over the streamable-http transport. Tool names come from the route path after /api/v1, so obb.cboe.equity.quote is the tool cboe_equity_quote. Next to the command tools, every server has run_pipeline for chaining tools on the server, list_prompts, get_prompt, list_resources, and read_resource for clients without native prompt and resource support, and install_skill.

On first start the server writes its defaults to ~/.openbb_platform/mcp_settings.json.

Choose the tools

A large installation produces hundreds of tools. Two flags keep the list manageable. --allowed-categories serves only the named categories, where a category is the first path segment after the prefix, which in V5 is usually the provider namespace:

openbb-mcp --allowed-categories cboe,imf

--tool-discovery hides the command tools behind four discovery tools, available_categories, available_tools, search_tools, and call_tool, so the agent searches for what it needs instead of receiving every definition up front:

openbb-mcp --tool-discovery

Discovery keeps no per-session state, so several clients can share one server.

Pick a transport

--transport accepts streamable-http (the default), sse, and stdio. Use stdio when the client launches the server as a subprocess, as Claude Desktop does:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "openbb-mcp": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "--from",
        "openbb-mcp-server",
        "--with",
        "openbb-cboe",
        "--with",
        "openbb-imf",
        "openbb-mcp",
        "--transport",
        "stdio"
      ]
    }
  }
}

HTTP clients such as Cursor and VS Code take the URL of a running server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "openbb-mcp": {
      "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8001/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Save the configuration

Command-line flags can live in an [mcp] table of an openbb.toml file, either in ~/.openbb_platform/, in the working directory or one of its parents, or at a path passed with --config-file:

[mcp]
host = "0.0.0.0"
port = 8001
allowed-categories = "cboe,imf"
tool-discovery = true

Flags given on the command line still win over the file.

Add to OpenBB Workspace

Follow the MCP tools guide to connect the running server to OpenBB Workspace.

Next steps

The openbb-mcp reference covers every setting, authentication, prompts, skills, per-route mcp_config, and serving a .spec file as a proxy.