# mcp-cli mcp-cli is IBM's open-source ([[Apache 2.0 License]]), Python command-line interface for interacting with [[Model Context Protocol (MCP)]] servers, letting you talk to [[Large Language Models (LLMs)]] with tool integration and conversation management from the terminal. It's a sibling in spirit to Simon Willison's [[llm CLI]], but built specifically around MCP tool execution rather than plain prompting. ## Modes - **Chat**: conversational interface with streaming responses and automatic tool use - **Interactive**: command-driven shell for direct server operations - **Command**: Unix-friendly interface for automation and scripting ## Key Features - Streaming responses with visible model reasoning - Multi-modal attachments (images, text, audio) - Concurrent tool execution; DAG-based parallel "execution plans" - Experimental "AI virtual memory" for context management - Real-time browser dashboard UI and MCP Apps (interactive HTML) support ## Providers Defaults to local [[Ollama]] with a `gpt-oss` reasoning model (no API key). Also supports [[OpenAI]], [[Anthropic]], Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, Groq, Perplexity, IBM watsonx, and Mistral. ## Install ```sh uvx mcp-cli --help ``` ## References - https://pypi.org/project/mcp-cli/ - https://github.com/IBM/mcp-cli ## Related - [[llm CLI]] - [[Model Context Protocol (MCP)]] - [[Large Language Models (LLMs)]] - [[Ollama]] - [[OpenAI]] - [[Anthropic]] - [[Apache 2.0 License]]