Portainer Container Management MCP server for AI agents

Portainer MCP connects your AI assistant directly to your Portainer environments, allowing you to manage resources like users and environments or execute Docker and Kubernetes commands through natural language interaction with your AI assistant.

Installation

You can download pre-built binaries for Linux (amd64, arm64) and macOS (arm64) from the Latest Release Page.

Download and Install

Download the appropriate archive for your system:

# Example for macOS (ARM64) - adjust version and architecture as needed
curl -Lo portainer-mcp-v0.2.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz https://github.com/portainer/portainer-mcp/releases/download/v0.2.0/portainer-mcp-v0.2.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

Optionally verify the checksum:

# Download the checksum file
curl -Lo portainer-mcp-v0.2.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz.md5 https://github.com/portainer/portainer-mcp/releases/download/v0.2.0/portainer-mcp-v0.2.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz.md5

# Verify (macOS)
if [ "$(md5 -q portainer-mcp-v0.2.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz)" = "$(cat portainer-mcp-v0.2.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz.md5)" ]; then echo "OK"; else echo "FAILED"; fi

# Verify (Linux)
# md5sum -c portainer-mcp-v0.2.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz.md5

Extract the archive:

tar -xzf portainer-mcp-v0.2.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

Move the executable to a location in your $PATH or note its location for configuration.

Usage

Configure with Claude Desktop

Configure Claude Desktop to use Portainer MCP:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "portainer": {
            "command": "/path/to/portainer-mcp",
            "args": [
                "-server",
                "[IP]:[PORT]",
                "-token",
                "[TOKEN]",
                "-tools",
                "/tmp/tools.yaml"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Replace [IP], [PORT], and [TOKEN] with your Portainer instance details and API access token.

By default, the tool looks for "tools.yaml" in the same directory as the binary. If the file doesn't exist, it will be created with default tool definitions. You may need to modify this path, particularly when using AI assistants that have restricted write permissions.

Tool Customization

You can customize the tool definitions by specifying a custom tools file path:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "portainer": {
            "command": "/path/to/portainer-mcp",
            "args": [
                "-server",
                "[IP]:[PORT]",
                "-token",
                "[TOKEN]",
                "-tools",
                "/path/to/custom/tools.yaml"
            ]
        }
    }
}

You can modify tool descriptions and parameters to adjust how AI models interpret them, or remove tools you don't wish to use.

Warning: Do not change tool names or parameter definitions (other than descriptions), as this will prevent tools from functioning correctly.

Read-Only Mode

For enhanced security, you can run in read-only mode to prevent any modifications to your Portainer resources:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "portainer": {
            "command": "/path/to/portainer-mcp",
            "args": [
                "-server",
                "[IP]:[PORT]",
                "-token",
                "[TOKEN]",
                "-read-only"
            ]
        }
    }
}

In read-only mode:

Only read tools (list, get) are available
Write tools (create, update, delete) are not loaded
Docker and Kubernetes proxy requests tools are not loaded

Version Compatibility

Portainer MCP is designed to work with specific versions of Portainer:

Portainer MCP Version	Supported Portainer Version
0.1.0	2.28.1
0.2.0	2.28.1
0.3.0	2.28.1
0.4.0	2.29.2
0.4.1	2.29.2
0.5.0	2.30.0

Supported Capabilities

Portainer MCP supports the following operations:

Environments

List all available environments
Update environment tags
Update user access policies for an environment
Update team access policies for an environment

Environment Groups (Edge Groups)

List all available environment groups
Create new environment groups
Update environment group names
Update environments associated with a group
Update tags associated with a group

Access Groups (Endpoint Groups)

List all available access groups
Create new access groups
Update access group names
Update user/team accesses for an access group
Add/remove environments to/from an access group

Stacks (Edge Stacks)

List all available stacks
Get compose files for specific stacks
Create new Docker stacks
Update existing Docker stacks

Tags, Teams, and Users

List and create environment tags
List, create, and update teams and team memberships
List and update users
Get Portainer instance settings

Docker and Kubernetes

Proxy any Docker API requests
Proxy any Kubernetes API requests

How to install this MCP server

For Claude Code

To add this MCP server to Claude Code, run this command in your terminal:

claude mcp add-json "portainer" '{"command":"/path/to/portainer-mcp","args":["-server","[IP]:[PORT]","-token","[TOKEN]","-tools","/tmp/tools.yaml"]}'

See the official Claude Code MCP documentation for more details.

For Cursor

There are two ways to add an MCP server to Cursor. The most common way is to add the server globally in the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file so that it is available in all of your projects.

If you only need the server in a single project, you can add it to the project instead by creating or adding it to the .cursor/mcp.json file.

Adding an MCP server to Cursor globally

To add a global MCP server go to Cursor Settings > Tools & Integrations and click "New MCP Server".

When you click that button the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file will be opened and you can add your server like this:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "portainer": {
            "command": "/path/to/portainer-mcp",
            "args": [
                "-server",
                "[IP]:[PORT]",
                "-token",
                "[TOKEN]",
                "-tools",
                "/tmp/tools.yaml"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Adding an MCP server to a project

To add an MCP server to a project you can create a new .cursor/mcp.json file or add it to the existing one. This will look exactly the same as the global MCP server example above.

How to use the MCP server

Once the server is installed, you might need to head back to Settings > MCP and click the refresh button.

The Cursor agent will then be able to see the available tools the added MCP server has available and will call them when it needs to.

You can also explicitly ask the agent to use the tool by mentioning the tool name and describing what the function does.

For Claude Desktop

To add this MCP server to Claude Desktop:

1. Find your configuration file:

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

2. Add this to your configuration file:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "portainer": {
            "command": "/path/to/portainer-mcp",
            "args": [
                "-server",
                "[IP]:[PORT]",
                "-token",
                "[TOKEN]",
                "-tools",
                "/tmp/tools.yaml"
            ]
        }
    }
}

3. Restart Claude Desktop for the changes to take effect