GitLab MCP Server

The most comprehensive Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for GitLab — 86 tools, enterprise-ready, actively maintained.

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What it is

GitLab MCP Server lets an AI agent (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Zed, VS Code, or any Model Context Protocol client) talk directly to GitLab. It is a typed, paginated, schema-validated bridge to the GitLab REST API, exposed as 86 MCP tools. It is not a wrapper around glab and it does not screen-scrape.

It runs against gitlab.com or any self-hosted GitLab instance, and authenticates with a personal access token, an OAuth Bearer token forwarded by an upstream gateway, or a read-only token for safe demos.

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Why it exists

Anthropic released MCP on November 25, 2024. The reference servers covered Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Git, Postgres, and Puppeteer. There was no GitLab server. The Yoda Digital engineering team runs on self-hosted GitLab, so the official examples did not help us, and the early community ports were not yet trying to cover the GitLab surface area properly.

We wrote one for ourselves. Group projects, activity tracking, the operations our DevOps actually needed. We open-sourced it on March 18, 2025, expecting maybe five people to find it useful.

A year on the project has 86 tools, working stdio / SSE / Streamable HTTP transports, PAT and OAuth modes, a Docker image on ghcr.io, and a Helm chart written almost entirely by an external contributor we had never met. Releases 0.4.0 and 0.5.0 are mostly someone else's code now, which is the best problem an open-source maintainer can have.

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Quick start

Local clients (stdio)

For Claude Desktop, Cursor, Zed, and any client that runs MCP servers as a local subprocess. Add this to your client's MCP config (for Claude Desktop, that's claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gitlab": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@yoda.digital/gitlab-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "GITLAB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN": "glpat-…",
        "GITLAB_API_URL": "https://gitlab.com/api/v4"
      }
    }
  }
}

Self-hosted? Replace GITLAB_API_URL with your instance, e.g. https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4. Want a safe demo with no write access? Add "GITLAB_READ_ONLY_MODE": "true". Per-IDE notes are in docs/CURSOR_INTEGRATION.md.

Remote (Streamable HTTP, OAuth-gated)

For shared deployments and modern remote MCP clients, run the server as an HTTP service. Network-exposed deployments require AUTH_MODE=oauth — the server refuses to start with AUTH_MODE=pat on a non-loopback bind. See SECURITY.md for the threat model.

docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 \
  -e HOST=0.0.0.0 \
  -e AUTH_MODE=oauth \
  -e USE_STREAMABLE_HTTP=true \
  ghcr.io/yoda-digital/mcp-gitlab-server:latest

Then front the container with a gateway that injects Authorization: Bearer <token> per connection — the server forwards that Bearer to GitLab as the per-connection PAT. Point clients at http://your-gateway/mcp.

Operational details, probe configuration, and troubleshooting are in docs/OPERATIONS.md.

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What's in the box

86 tools, grouped by surface: