MCPJungle: A Self-Hosted Gateway That Puts Many MCP Servers Behind One Endpoint
One place to manage & connect to all your MCP servers
At a glance
- What is it?
- MCPJungle is a Go MCP gateway and registry that lets you register servers once and point Claude, Cursor, Codex or a custom agent at a single streamable HTTP endpoint. It is straightforward to stand up locally, but the README itself points at a limitations section and a docs site for the operational detail.
- Who is it for?
- Adopt MCPJungle if you run more than a couple of MCP servers across more than one client and you want a single self-hosted endpoint plus a registry you can reproduce. Do not adopt it if you have one server and one client, or if you cannot run a long-lived process that the client must reach.
- Can I use it commercially?
- Yes, with conditions. MPL-2.0 is a weak copyleft licence: you can use it inside commercial and closed-source software, but if you distribute changes to its own files, you must publish those changes under the same licence.
- Is it still maintained?
- Yes. The repository last received commits 44 days ago.
- What is it written in?
- Mainly Go, according to GitHub's language statistics.
Answers come from the project's GitHub data, last synced on September 15, 2026, and from our analysis. They are not legal advice.
DEEP OPEN-SOURCE ANALYSIS
The configuration sprawl MCPJungle Is Aimed At
The problem MCPJungle addresses is stated plainly in the README: without a gateway, every client needs its own MCP server configuration, tools and prompts are scattered across servers, access control is duplicated or absent, teams have no shared view of available tools, and local setups become hard to reproduce. That list is the actual scope of the project. It is not a tool that makes MCP servers faster or smarter. It is a registry and a routing layer for people who have accumulated enough MCP servers that per-client JSON files have stopped being maintainable.
The intended audience is developers and teams. The README frames two deployment shapes: a local one to keep a personal setup clean, and a shared one as team infrastructure with centralized discovery, access control and observability. The second shape is where the project's design decisions make more sense. A single developer with two MCP servers gains little from a gateway and takes on a new process to keep alive. A team where five people each configure the same eight servers, with no agreement on which tools are exposed to which client, is the case the registry model is built for.
Registry, Gateway and CLI: How the Pieces Fit
MCPJungle is a client-server system, and the README notes that the single binary can run both roles. The server holds the registry: it manages every MCP server registered with it and exposes a unified MCP gateway that agents connect to for discovery and tool calls. The CLI is the client that talks to that server.
The naming convention matters for anyone reading tool output. After registering a server named context7, the quickstart has Claude call context7__get-library-docs. The registered server name becomes a prefix on the tool name, which is how the gateway keeps tools from different upstream servers from colliding in one flat namespace. If two upstream servers expose a tool with the same name, the prefix is what disambiguates them.
The README also lists tool groups as an optional feature to expose only the tools a client should see. That is the mechanism for scoping a client to a subset of the registry rather than handing every connected agent the full tool list. Beyond that, the README names authentication, access control and OpenTelemetry under an enterprise features heading, and defers to docs.mcpjungle.com for the details. The README does not describe how access control is enforced or what the OpenTelemetry integration emits, so treat those as features to read up on rather than features to assume.
The README references a section on the cold-start problem and stateful connections. That heading exists in the legacy reference, but the supplied text does not include its contents, so the specific behavior is not something I can describe here. It is worth reading directly, because connection lifecycle is the part of a gateway that most often surprises people.
Getting It Running: docker compose, brew and register
The quickstart is three steps. First, fetch the compose file and start the server:
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcpjungle/MCPJungle/refs/heads/main/docker-compose.yaml docker compose up -d
By default this exposes the streamable HTTP MCP server at http://localhost:8080/mcp. Second, install the CLI, either from the releases page or with Homebrew:
brew install mcpjungle/mcpjungle/mcpjungle
Third, register an upstream server. The quickstart uses context7:
mcpjungle register --name context7 --url https://mcp.context7.com/mcp
On the client side, the README shows Claude Desktop connecting through mcp-remote, with args mcp-remote, http://localhost:8080/mcp and the --allow-http flag. That flag is there because the endpoint is plain HTTP on localhost; dropping it is the kind of detail that produces a confusing failure if you copy the config without reading it.
Two installation constraints are stated in the README. The binary is not notarized for macOS, so Homebrew is required there rather than a direct download. And the container image is published at ghcr.io/mcpjungle/mcpjungle, which the README describes as useful for running the registry server. The legacy reference also documents registering STDIO-based MCP servers and deregistering them, plus a way to point the CLI at a custom registry URL. Those commands are not reproduced in the supplied text, so check the docs site for the exact syntax before you script them.
Where a Gateway Stops Being the Right Answer
A gateway is a new dependency in the path of every tool call. MCPJungle needs a running server process, reachable by whatever client you use. If it is down, your agents lose access to every registered tool at once, not just one. For a single developer running the compose file on a laptop, that is a minor annoyance. For a shared deployment, it is a service with an availability expectation, and the README does not describe a high-availability story.
The README also has a limitations section in its table of contents, which is a reasonable signal that the maintainers track the gaps themselves. I cannot enumerate those limitations from the supplied material, and I will not guess at them. Read that section before you plan a rollout.
There is a scoping cost too. Tool groups gate what a client sees, but the registry itself is shared state. Adding a server for one team member changes what is available to everyone connected to that instance unless groups are configured carefully. If your actual need is isolation between teams, a shared gateway is the wrong shape and you would be better served by separate instances than by one instance with elaborate grouping.
Finally, the enterprise features heading in the README suggests that at least some access-control and observability capability is not part of the default story. If your adoption decision depends on per-user authorization or on exporting traces, confirm what ships in the open source build before you build a plan around it.
The Alternative: Per-Client Configuration Without a Gateway
The realistic alternative is what MCPJungle exists to replace: each client keeps its own mcpServers block, each MCP server is configured directly, and there is no intermediate process. In that setup a tool call goes straight from Claude or Cursor to the upstream server. There is nothing to keep running, nothing to authenticate against, and no single point of failure.
The difference in approach is where state and control live. Direct configuration pushes both to the client, which is why the README's complaint list is about duplication and drift rather than performance. A gateway pulls that state to the server, which buys you one place to register a server, one place to define which tools a client sees, and one endpoint to hand a new team member. You pay for it with a process that must be running and a routing hop on every call. The choice is essentially whether your coordination cost across clients and people exceeds the cost of operating one more service. For one person and one client, it does not. For a team maintaining a shared tool catalog, it usually does.
Upgrades, Maintenance and the MPL-2.0 Licence
The release cadence visible in the repository is modest and irregular: 0.4.6 in August 2026, 0.4.5 in May 2026, and 0.4.4 six days before that. Three releases in the window shown, with a gap of roughly two and a half months between the last two. That pattern suggests a project that ships when there is something to ship rather than on a fixed schedule. Plan upgrades as deliberate events rather than assuming a steady stream of patches.
The practical upgrade path depends on how you run it. If you use the published container image, upgrading means pulling a new tag, and the compose file the quickstart tells you to curl from the main branch is not pinned to a version. Fetching that file again on upgrade day could change more than the image tag. If you use the Homebrew formula or a release binary for the CLI, note that the CLI and the server are separate artifacts and can drift apart, so check whether a given release changed the client-server contract before upgrading only one side.
MCPJungle is licensed under MPL-2.0, a file-level copyleft licence. Modifications to files that are part of the covered source must be made available under the same licence, while larger works that combine it with other code can generally be distributed under other terms. That is a summary of the licence's structure, not legal advice. If you intend to modify MCPJungle and ship it, or to embed it in a product, have counsel review the specific files you change and how you distribute them.
Who Should Adopt It, and What to Check First
The fit is a team running several MCP servers across several clients, willing to operate a self-hosted service, and wanting a registry that a new team member can point at instead of a wiki page of JSON snippets. The local mode is also reasonable for one developer who has accumulated enough servers that editing client configs has become tedious, provided they are comfortable running docker compose on their machine.
The misfit is a single server with a single client, or an environment where the client cannot reach a long-lived HTTP endpoint and must launch servers itself. The mcp-remote bridge shown in the quickstart exists precisely because some clients do not speak streamable HTTP natively, and adding that bridge is another moving part in the chain.
Before adopting, verify three things against docs.mcpjungle.com rather than the README. Read the limitations section, since the README only tells you it exists. Confirm whether the authentication and access-control behavior you need is in the open source build or listed under enterprise features. And check the cold-start and stateful-connections documentation, because connection reuse across a gateway is the detail most likely to change how you deploy it. The README itself recommends the docs site over the README for current operational detail, and for a project moving this fast that is the right instinct.
Editorial conclusion
Adopt MCPJungle if you run more than a couple of MCP servers across more than one client and you want a single self-hosted endpoint plus a registry you can reproduce. Do not adopt it if you have one server and one client, or if you cannot run a long-lived process that the client must reach. Before committing, verify two things against the docs site: what the current limitations section says, and whether the authentication and access-control features you need are in the open source build or behind the enterprise heading in the README.
Community notes