🧪 MCP Tooling in Rust: Reducing Installation Friction

[elasticdotventures]

MCP servers are soooo hot right now. https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction

When moving between different hosts, having a shared vscode profile having "self installing" mcp servers in project specific settings in mcp_settings.json is a dream come true. Currently afaik Rust has no mechanism to install + execute using cargo.

Rust is a wonderful language for MCP "vibe code" & agentic AI code generation because if rustc compiles, the executable is devoid of a huge class of memory overflow & other types of errors the compiler guarantees won't be present, as well as advanced linting. Fast & meaningful linting or access to the editors LSP is super important when LLMs are in play. MCP plays a critical role in the IDE by connecting the AI agent to the LLM using an instruction protocol.

Despite MCP being a language-neutral specification, the Rust MCP SDK isn't stable (or even useful afaik), whereas the Python and NodeJS libraries at github.com/modelcontextprotocol are more mature right now. I'm sure the Rust SDK will be awesome when it's stable.

However, there's another issue I want to address: how to do low-friction installation of MCP tools in Rust/cargo.

By frictionless, I mean:

You paste the JSON into the mcpServer in mcp_settings.json and the provider simply turns green & starts working. ✅

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🧰 Existing Approaches

• Node.js has npx & bunx
• Python has uvx, pipx

Both ecosystems support downloading + installing + running MCP servers.

Most Python projects still specify pip, and only a few suggest first installing uv, then using uvx.

Node.js npx and bunx are the easiest — but both often run into problems with outdated NodeJS runtimes in environments like VSCode extension hosts.

Trying to debug that? High friction.

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🦀 What About Rust?

I've always found cargo quite novel — Rust is one of the few languages with its own packaging system. I realize they are separate, but also at this point quite inseparable.

In this case, MCP is still new, and perhaps there’s opportunity to enhance cargo. That’s the discussion I’d like to start.

I think the best approach for Rust is probably to build on top of pkgx, though several options scratch the itch in different ways — none of them fully support the MCP use case yet.

🔍 Tool Comparison

Tool	Category	Crates.io	GitHub	Installs to	Auto-run	Comments
cargo install	Built-in Cargo	✅	✅ (SO ref)	~/.cargo/bin	❌	Default method; installs CLI but doesn’t auto-execute.
cargo-binstall	Cargo subcommand	✅	✅ (GitHub)	~/.cargo/bin	❌	Prefers prebuilt binaries for fast install; falls back to compiling.
cargo-run-bin	Cargo subcommand	✅	✅ (GitHub)	Workspace cache	✅ (via alias)	Runs tools in Cargo.toml w/ locked versions. Not for ad-hoc use.
pkgx	Standalone CLI	🚫	✅ (published binaries)	Transient (no install)	✅	Cleanest UX so far; own registry/pantry.

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💭 Final Thoughts

Does anybody have thoughts on how to reduce the MCP server friction?
Should we unify around a standard Rust-first install + run pattern for MCP tooling?
Drop your thoughts below ⬇️

[mxcl]

We need something like cargox, I believe there is some scriptable way to do cargo scripts which would do the trick, then you can make a pkgx shebang that does that.

[mxcl]

Yeah there is https://rust-script.org/ which pkgx has already packaged so it would be something like:

#!/usr/bin/env -S pkgx +cargo rust-script

//! ```cargo
//! [dependencies]
//! time = "0.1.25"
//! ```

//…

[mxcl]

Note that an AI can automatically install a temporary pkgx via our MCP server. Though exactly how that can integrate with the use of other MCP servers I am not sure.