Practical MCP with FastMCP & LangChain

NPM and Node.js

We're going to use npx to run some tools in this guide, such as the MCP Inspector. npx is a package runner that comes with npm (Node Package Manager). It allows you to run Node.js packages without having to install them globally on your system.

This is useful for running command-line tools that are distributed as npm packages.

To use npx, you need to have Node.js and npm installed on your system. You can install them using the following command:

# Download and install nvm
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.3/install.sh | bash

# in lieu of restarting the shell
\. "$HOME