Clients

2 min

There are three ways to talk to the Litmus MCP server:

The built-in Web UI on port 9000. A browser chat interface bundled with the server. No external MCP client required.

External SSE clients connect to the MCP endpoint on port 8000. Used by Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, and any other MCP client that supports remote/SSE servers. Credentials are passed as HTTP headers.

External STDIO clients like Claude Desktop run the server as a child process. Credentials come from environment variables.

Every external SSE client uses the same header set. See Headers Reference for what each header does.

Pick a client

Client	Transport	Config file
Web UI	n/a (bundled)	n/a
Claude Code CLI	SSE	~/.claude/mcp.json
Cursor IDE	SSE	~/.cursor/mcp.json or .cursor/mcp.json
VS Code / GitHub Copilot	SSE	User settings JSON or .vscode/mcp.json
Windsurf	SSE	~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json
Claude Desktop	STDIO	claude_desktop_config.json

Common header block

Every SSE client uses some variant of:

"headers": {
  "EDGE_URL": "https://<LITMUSEDGE_IP>",
  "EDGE_API_CLIENT_ID": "<oauth2_client_id>",
  "EDGE_API_CLIENT_SECRET": "<oauth2_client_secret>",
  "NATS_SOURCE": "<LITMUSEDGE_IP>",
  "NATS_PORT": "4222",
  "NATS_USER": "<access_token_username>",
  "NATS_PASSWORD": "<access_token_from_litmusedge>",
  "INFLUX_HOST": "<LITMUSEDGE_IP>",
  "INFLUX_PORT": "8086",
  "INFLUX_DB_NAME": "tsdata",
  "INFLUX_USERNAME": "<datahub_username>",
  "INFLUX_PASSWORD": "<datahub_password>"
}

LEM-related headers (EDGE_MANAGER_URL, EDGE_API_TOKEN, EDGE_MANAGER_PROJECT_ID, EDGE_MANAGER_ADMIN_URL, VALIDATE_CERTIFICATE) are optional and only needed if you intend to call lem_* tools.