noelshebert/nerdctl-mcp-server

nerdctl-mcp-server

MCP Server for Nerdctl coded in Go

nerdctl-mcp-server is a fork of podman-mcp-server (https://github.com/manusa/podman-mcp-server) with all the non-Go stuff stripped away. To be fair, most of the work put into this fork has been to find/replace any mention of Podman/Docker with Nerdctl. As Nerdctl like Podman has a command-line API copied from the Docker CLI, this was not difficult. There was some cleanup of syntax of inline descriptions to make sense, and removal of comments referring to Podman documentation. Lastly, code hygiene offered by the Go LSP (interface{} replaced by any for example) were applied.

Why Nerdctl?

Well, the answer is historical. I started using Nerdctl a number of years ago as a rootless alternative to Docker (which was not ready at the time) and Podman at that time was flakey. In addition, the most current version of Podman was not readily available on Ubuntu, my distribution of choice.

Now, Docker has a working rootless mode. I still don't use it because I just don't. I do use Podman most of the time, however I still use Nerdctl on my main server and it's fun just to be able to say "I use nerdctl, by-the-way!" ;-)

I am actively learning all things AI, especially integrating it into my workflows. Most AI assistive tools make use of MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and a Podman server has already done by Marc Nuri (manusa). Why not Nerdctl?

Prerequisites

At its heart, nerdctl-mcp-server is essentially a command wrapper around a selected set of nerdctl commands. In order for the MCP server to be useful, nerdctl must be already installed on the machine running the server. You should also have Go installed. Lastly, it is necessary to have some variation of make installed. To be honest, I do not use MacOS (darwin), so I am expecting that it is reasonably close to Linux. I proactively avoid Windows in all its forms so make of that what you will.

Building and installing nerdctl-mcp-server

Building the binary for nerdctl-mcp-server is straight forward. Just use the included Makefile. If unsure just:

make help

Building for your specific platform should be as simple as:

make build

If still unsure, there is always:

make build-all-platforms

Using the multi-platform capability of Go, it will build binaries for arm64/amd64 Linux, arm64/amd64 MacOS (darwin) and arm64/amd65 Windows.

After the binary has been build, simply copy the binary to a folder/directory that is in your $PATH.

Trying out nerdctl-mcp-server

A very handy tool that every developer of, or user of MCP Servers should be aware of is mcp-inspector. https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/inspector.