Try it locally

Before wiring up a real server, a hostname and a certificate, you can run a throwaway hub with three fake MCP servers and point an inspector at it. It takes one command and shows the parts that are hard to picture from a config file: the /hub aggregate, per-server endpoints, resource-bound tokens and idle sleep.

The setup lives in demo/ in the repository.

git clone https://github.com/ni-c/mcp-hub.git
cd mcp-hub/demo
docker compose up -d
curl -s localhost:7690/livez

The hub is now on http://localhost:7690, the login password is demo, and three servers are configured:

Endpoint	Tools
/weather/mcp	list_stations, get_forecast
/tickets/mcp	list_tickets, get_ticket, create_ticket, list_statuses
/docs/mcp	search_docs, read_doc, list_docs
/hub	all three at once, through six meta-tools

They answer from tables compiled into them — no network, no filesystem, no stored state — so the same call gives the same answer every time, and nothing a visitor does outlasts the request.

Not a deployment template

The demo publishes its password, speaks plain HTTP, sleeps servers after a minute and keeps state in a volume nobody backs up. For a real host use docker-compose.example.yml and the deployment guide.

MCP Inspector

Start the inspector and leave it running:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector

Then open the pre-filled link:

http://localhost:6274/?transport=http&serverUrl=http://localhost:7690/hub

The serverUrl and transport parameters fill the connection form; pressing Connect is still yours to do, because the inspector auto-connects only for a link that carries its own session token — which a link in a document cannot know. Replace /hub with /weather/mcp to connect to one server instead of the aggregate.

For authorization, either let the inspector run the OAuth flow (the password is demo) or paste a bearer token from ./token.sh hub into the Authentication field.

MCPJam

npx @mcpjam/inspector@latest

Add a server, set the connection type to HTTP and enter http://localhost:7690/hub. Authorization is the same choice: OAuth with the password demo, or a token from ./token.sh hub.

The hosted app at app.mcpjam.com cannot reach this demo. It connects to HTTPS endpoints only, and the demo is plain HTTP on localhost — use the local inspector above or the desktop app.

Tokens

demo/token.sh mints API tokens through the admin CLI:

./token.sh            # a token for /hub
./token.sh weather    # a token for /weather/mcp
./token.sh --all      # one per resource

Tokens are bound to one resource, which is easy to see here: a hub token gets a 401 from /weather/mcp. That is the default behaviour, not a misconfiguration.

What to look for

• The aggregate versus one server. Connected to /hub, a client carries six tool schemas — list_servers, list_tools, get_tool_schema, call_tool, wake_server, sleep_server — and reaches nine tools through them. Connected to /tickets/mcp it sees that one server, natively. See architecture.
• Idle sleep. The demo sets IDLE_TIMEOUT_MINUTES=1, so you can watch it happen: leave a server alone for a minute or two — the sweep for idle servers runs once a minute, so it is not to the second — and list_servers reports it as sleeping. list_tools keeps answering from the tool cache, and the next call_tool wakes the server without the client noticing. weather is configured "keepAlive": true and stays up. See on-demand servers.
• Hot reload. Edit config/mcp.json while the hub runs — no restart. See configuration.
• /health. State, restart count and tool count per server.

Clean up

docker compose down -v

-v removes the data volume with its tokens and client registrations, so the next start is a blank slate.