Prototyping Your Own MCP Server

Each MCP server brings extra tools, APIs, and abilities to perform specialized tasks. Creating your own MCP server is not a wildly complex task. To get started, you can follow the MCP Server Guide, but the general steps can be summarized as follows:

Choose a programming language and framework (Python, Node.js, etc.).
Implement the MCP server interface (handle requests, responses).
Define the tools and functions your server will provide.
Test your server locally.
Deploy your server (locally, cloud, etc.).
Integrate with Copilot by adding it to your mcp.json or settings.json.

To better illustrate the process, let's create a simple server that provides system information about the host machine. The goal is not to create a production-ready server - this would require more work and it's out of the scope of this guide - but to show you how easy it is to create a simple MCP server.

Start by installing uv with the standalone installers or your package manager of choice.

This is the directory structure we will create:

MCPServers
├── mcp-sysinfo
│   ├── pyproject.toml
│   └── server.py

Create a new directory for your MCP server and navigate into it:

mkdir mcp-sysinfo && cd mcp-sysinfo

Create a lightweight pyproject so that uvx can resolve dependencies. Open pyproject.toml and add:

[project]
name = "mcp-sysinfo"
version = "0.0.1"
requires-python = ">=3.11"
dependencies = [
    "mcp[cli]",
    "typer>=0.16.1",
]

Let's write some code. Create a file named server.py and add:

# Import necessary modules for the MCP server
from dataclasses import asdict, dataclass  # asdict: convert dataclass to dict; dataclass: decorator for simple data classes
import os  # Provides functions for interacting with the operating system, like environment variables
import platform  # Module to access platform-specific information
import multiprocessing  # Module for multiprocessing, used here to get CPU count
from mcp.server.fastmcp import FastMCP  # Import FastMCP, the framework for building MCP servers

# Create an instance of FastMCP server named "SysInfo"
mcp = FastMCP("SysInfo")

# Define a data class to hold system information
@dataclass
class SysInfo:
    os: str  # Operating system name (e.g., 'Linux', 'Windows')
    version: str  # Operating system version
    arch: str  # Machine architecture (e.g., 'x86_64', 'arm64')
    cpu_count: int  # Number of CPU cores available
    home: str | None  # Path to the user's home directory, can be None if not set
    shell: str | None  # Default shell or command prompt, can be None

# Decorate the function to register it as an MCP tool
@mcp.tool()
def system_info() -> dict:
    """
    Return a minimal snapshot of the OS and simple configuration.
    """
    # Gather system information and create a SysInfo instance
    info = SysInfo(
        os=platform.system(),  # Get the operating system name
        version=platform.version(),  # Get the operating system version
        arch=platform.machine(),

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