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Getting Started With Helix-MCP

HelixDB conveniently has custom MCP endpoints built into it making it easy for AI agents to interface with it. We also provide an MCP server that you can hook right up to any LLM provider you’re using! We’ll walk through how to do this with Claude Desktop. For more information on installing Claude Desktop, click here.

First start off by fetching the mcp server:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HelixDB/helix-py/refs/heads/main/apps/mcp_server.py

Then you’ll want to setup a uv project so that you can install the dependencies. You’ll want to run:

uv init project
cp mcp_server.py project
cd project

Then setup a virtual environment and install the servers dependencies:

uv venv && source .venv/bin/activate
uv add helix-py "mcp[cli]"

Finally, copy this configuration into ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json assuming you’re on Mac OS. If not, copy this snippet to wherever your claude desktop config is located.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "helix-mcp": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "/Users/user/Downloads/project",
        "run",
        "mcp_server.py"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Don’t forget to adjust the path to your mcp_server.py in the snippet!

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Setting up HelixDB

Before running the server in Claude Desktop, you also want to make sure that you have an actual running Helix instance. See our installation guide for that.