MCP Fundamentals

In this video, you will set up your development environment for building your first MCP server. You will install Claude Desktop, ngrok, the uv packet manager for Python, and create your project structure.

First, download Claude Desktop from claude.com/download. Claude Desktop is available for both macOS and Windows. Click the download button for your operating system and run the installer. The installation is straightforward; just follow the prompts.

Once installed, open Claude Desktop and sign in with your Anthropic account. You’ll see a clean chat interface. This is where you will eventually test your MCP server.

Next, install ngrok. You can download it from ngrok.com/download to prepare for exposing your local server later.

Now, set up your Python environment. You’ll use uv, a modern Python packet manager that’s incredibly fast and handles dependencies elegantly. Open your terminal. On macOS or Linux, run this curl command to install uv.

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

On Windows, open PowerShell and run the following command.

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

After installation, you might need to restart your terminal for the uv command to be available. Verify it works by running:

uv --version

Now, create your project. Navigate to where you want your project folder and run:

uv init hello-world-mcp
cd hello-world-mcp

uv has created a new Python project with a basic structure.

Now, add the MCP packet as a dependency.

uv add "mcp[cli]"

This installed the MCP Python SDK along with its command-line tools. The SDK provides FastMCP, a high-level framework that makes building MCP servers incredibly simple. Your development environment is now ready. In the next section, you’ll write the actual MCP server code.