shadcn MCP server MCP server

The shadcn MCP server comes with the shadcn CLI and lets an AI assistant work with component registries in plain language. It can list what a registry offers, search across several registries at once, and install items into your project, acting as a bridge between the assistant, the registries and the CLI. The default shadcn/ui registry needs no configuration; others, including private company registries, are added under registries in your project's components.json and addressed with an @namespace. In a project, the docs give one command for Claude Code: pnpm dlx shadcn@latest mcp init --client claude. The manual equivalent is an entry named shadcn in .mcp.json whose command is npx with the arguments shadcn@latest and mcp. Restart Claude Code and run /mcp to confirm it shows as connected. The docs also cover Cursor, VS Code, OpenCode and Codex; for Codex the config file has to be edited by hand. We find it useful in the moment an agent is about to hand-write a dialog or a form from scratch. Asking it to add the button, dialog and card components, or to build a contact form from the registry, gets you the same components the rest of your project uses rather than a lookalike. It depends on the project being set up for shadcn. The troubleshooting section says an install can fail without a valid components.json, and asks you to confirm the target directories exist and that the configured registries can be reached. Private registries need their tokens set as environment variables.