Video ID: 45WPU7P-1QQ
YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45WPU7P-1QQ
Added At: 13-06-25 21:16:24
Processed: No
Sentiment: Neutral
Categories: Education, Tech
Tags: AI, MCP, Model Context Protocol, N8N, Workflow, Tutorial, Programming, LLMs, Claude models, SD cards, RESTful APIs
Summary
Bullet points for the video: 1. Introduction to MCP (Model Context Protocol) and its relevance in AI industry. 2. Explanation of key conceptual entities in the MCP framework. 3. Demostration of how to use MCP server and client nodes within N8N workflow.
Transcript
hey flowgrammer! N8N just dropped a native MCP server and MCP client node in this video I'm going to quickly explain what MCP is and why it might be relevant for you and then we're going to take a look at how to use the new MCP server and MCP client nodes within n8n so if you already know what MCP is use the chapters to skip ahead mcp is an abbreviation it stands for model context protocol it was designed and released by Anthropic creator of the popular Claude models including Sonnet 3.7 and it's an attempt to standardize the communication that LLMs do with other systems since its release near the end of 2024 it's gotten quite a lot of adoption in particular OpenAI has signed on to support the standard and various SAS apps and other desktop tools even are bringing support for MCP the reason that's important of course is the utility a protocol can provide really hinges on its network effect right if people aren't adopting it no one's going to use it so for example SD cards were useful because everyone used SD cards sony's memory stick that's a different story there's plenty of videos that will give you a really deep technical dive into what MCP is so I'm just going to keep it really high level and go over the key conceptual entities in the MCP framework the first relevant entity is the MCP host this is your LLM powered app that basically needs context from the outside world from outside systems or to interact with those systems i.e use them as tools so claw desktop would be an example of an MCP host the next one is the MCP client this manages the connections between hosts and servers which brings us to the MCP server which is typically a lightweight program that exposes various functionality and actions basically that you can take in that server to my understanding right now and I think a lot of us are still wrapping our heads around this I like to think of the MCP server as basically an API and docs that's sent along to the MCP host which is your LLM and this way it gets a single package it knows what it can use how to use it and then the ability to use it as well so it's an actionable API essentially in the context of an LLM now before we get into the cool new MCP functionality within NN I do think it's important to note that MCP is a new protocol and not everyone in the engineering community is happy with it which if we look at the case of microservices for example you're never going to get all engineers to agree on something but the good argument that I've heard essentially was look we've got a lot of already well established protocols for computers to interact with each other for example restful APIs so why did we need to go create a new protocol which is a fair argument nonetheless it's being adopted across the AI industry again big players are adopting this the end team has added it to make sure that the end community can be on the bleeding edge and exploring how these new protocols could help us do more and I think the big question that we're all asking and we'd love the community to help on is why is MCP not just another REST API what can MCP allow you to do that we couldn't do before in the context of n8n workflows and I think that's a perfect segue to jump into the n8n canvas and check out the new MCP server and MCP client nodes within NAND i'm going to first show you how to use MCP server because it allows your claw desktop or any other MCP host to access the hundreds of different tools and and and custom workflows that you can build inside of Naden i think it's going to be super super powerful so from a blank workflow let's add our first step since the MCP server is something that our MCP host is going to consume in N it's going to be a trigger so let's search for MCP and then we see the MCP server trigger in here let's click to add that to the canvas it doesn't have any parameters right now this is in beta we're going to add some of the other things that MCP supports but the n8n team wanted to get this out get your feedback on this so we can iterate on it faster for you so if you do have any feedback make sure to go to community.net.io and drop a comment there so we've added the MCP server what we need to now do is give it some tools that then our host can access for this first example let's just add a really basic one and add the calculator tool because LM's are not that good at doing math so we'd rather have them use a tool for that so let's do that and let's save this now you're going to want to make sure that your workflow is activated so activate that next we need to go over to Claude or whatever your MCP host is again I'm going to use the Cord desktop app here if you don't have the Cord desktop app the dependencies you're going to need to run what we're doing here today is to download the Cord desktop app have an Enthropic account you're also going to have to have node installed because claw desktop today doesn't support communicating with MCP clients through SSE which is what the end team supports in the MCP trigger there's a lot of technical reasons why the end team chose that but you are going to have to use a gateway meanwhile that's going to basically do that SSE part and make sure that Claude can communicate with your MCP trigger once you open up Claude desktop make sure that you're in developer mode to do that from the top menu there's going to be a help section and it's going to say enable developer mode i already did that and I can't find a way to undo that but make sure that you're in claw developer mode and ask your favorite LM if you don't know how to do that all right so from Claude open the settings and then here we're going to go down to the developer section and we want to click this edit config button that's going to open up a folder and in here we see this JSON file so you're going to want to open that with your favorite text editor in this case I'm using Sublime unless you've been tinkering with MCP before this page is going to be blank and you're going to want to paste in this a few things to call out i am using Super Gateway here this is going to allow Claude to communicate with RMCP trigger over SACE protocol cuz Claude doesn't natively support that right now so that is a dependency and one pro tip here if this is failing if you're getting errors when you're trying this try to run this command manually in your terminal so npx and then pass this arguments super gateway s and then swap in your web hook URL because I was having some errors around this it was failing in terminal and I actually had some permission errors around node itself i fixed that and then it was working so if you're getting some errors around that first try to run this command manually in your terminal okay the structure here is we've got MCP servers we can have many of these MCP servers right and in this case we need to now paste in that web hook URL let's go back to my workflow let's open that up let's get the web hook URL copy that production URL let's copy that and let's paste that in here so this is all good here we're going to save this now we do need to restart Claude so I'm hitting command Q to close it we're going to open it back up it's loaded and we see now we've got one MCP tool available here and we see that we've got the calculator tool and it's from the NN server now we could have called the server calculator as well but let's assume you have like your end instance and you're going to want to have a few tools that you give cloud access to so this this could be a good way to go do that tool is called calculator let's see if we can run it so what is 50 * 10 use tool let's see okay so we get a permission check in here this is interesting nice it's even showing you what arguments it would use okay let's allow for this chat well this is really cool how it's kind of the UX of how it's showing you how it's interacting with that okay so this is what it responded with it's 500 let's go double check that so in my workflow I can go over to the executions great this one just ran let's just open up the calculator and see yep that's the 500 response query 50 * 10 perfect and so this is just the calculator tool right i'm sure Claude even has its own calculator so maybe that's not as interesting but what I'm trying to show you here is how to get unblocked on setting this up because actually creating this thing here took me a bit of effort there was a few headbanging moments so hopefully you avoid that if you're watching this on YouTube I'm going to have this in the description if you're watching this somewhere else get to the YouTube video I will have this snippet here for you and just to call out again we can add many different tools here there's all various vector stores you could use so your claw desktop or whatever host you're using can be a knowledge rag assistant already connecting with lots of different apps and services but some of the really cool ones to call out I think where Nitn end is going to be really interesting is again the call end workflow tool which is going to allow your MCP host to interact with any arbitrary end workflow that itself could be an AI agent it could be some airgapped self-hosted enterprise information that's that's really really sensitive for you so that's how you set up the MCP server trigger in N if I click the tool here from my AI agent let's add that to the canvas mcp and we'll see the MCP client tool so let's click to add that now we'll set it up in a second but just to contextualize this the AI agent in this case is a host right as the host it's going to interact with the client in the client we're going to configure the connection basically to the MCP server so then the AI agents our host it's using the client to interact with our MCP server now since we just built an MCP server through this MCP trigger in another workflow let's have our AI agent here interact with that calculator tool i'll double click on it and we're going to add a credential to connect with we'll create a new one and inside the credential the SSC endpoint that's what we need to actually get from our MCP trigger here so I'll go in here and grab that production URL paste in our SSE endpoint and let's save this and okay great great we've got a connection test now that this is set up let's close the credential since an MCP server can offer multiple tools we could choose to get all of the tools that that server has available or we could just select those so in this case we can see we've established a connection with the system because it's shown us this calculator here perfect so now let's go back to the workflow canvas and let's give this a quick test by opening the manual chat let's ask it to calculate 15 * 10 okay it's used the tool let's have a look in the logs here yep it sent the query and we got the response now let's go over to our trigger here let's go in the executions and we can see that yep it also ran perfect that's how you set up an MCP client with MCP servers from an AI agent within N8N so I just explained what MCP is how you can set up an MCP server in n8n natively the same for setting up an MCP tool which is an MCP client so that you can connect with other MCP servers the next step is go update your version of n8n and go have fun and if you haven't signed up for n8n yet u make sure to use my coupon code max 50 after your cloud trial that's going to give you 50% off n8n Cloud for a whole year you can self-host and it ended in as well but if you choose our cloud option my boss is going to be really happy if you if you go to cloud of course i hope you found this video useful please do give me some feedback on what you'd like to see more of or what you think I may have missed i expect this isn't going to be the last video I do on this topic thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it i'm Max the original flowgrammer you're awesome for watching this video and happy flowing [Music]