Practical MCP with FastMCP & LangChain

Installation

FastMCP is a Python framework and is available - like most popular Python libraries - on PyPI. You can install it using pip, or using your preferred Python package manager. For this course, we're using uv since it provides a great development experience with a built-in virtual environment and fast installs.

To install FastMCP in a new virtual environment, we'll first create a new directory for our project and navigate into it:

mkdir -p $HOME/workspace/fastmcp_demo
cd $HOME/workspace/fastmcp_demo

Then we can install FastMCP using uv:

# Start a new virtual environment
uv init --bare --python=3.12

# Install FastMCP
uv add "fastmcp==3.0.2"

If we want to add the background tasks feature, we need to run uv add "fastmcp[tasks]==3.0.2" instead. This will install the additional dependencies required for the "task" utility of the MCP protocol.