IBM ContextForge 🔌 MCP server Open source

What it does

ContextForge is IBM's open-source gateway and registry for MCP. You don't point every coding agent at a dozen separate MCP servers. Instead, you register those servers, plus REST or gRPC APIs and A2A agents, with the gateway once. Then you publish "virtual servers" that bundle only the tools a team or project should see. Clients connect to one endpoint, and the gateway handles authentication, rate limits, retries, logging and OpenTelemetry tracing. It can also wrap plain REST and gRPC services as MCP tools, and it can bridge a stdio-only server to SSE or Streamable HTTP. It pays off for teams running many servers, not for a solo developer with two.

Tools it gives your agent

• Whatever you register: tools, prompts and resources from the federated servers, filtered for each virtual server
• Adapted APIs: REST endpoints and gRPC services (found through server reflection) turned into MCP tools
• Prompt registry: Jinja2 prompt templates with versioning and rollback
• Agents: A2A and OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible agents exposed through the same gateway

Works with

It is a self-hosted remote server. Clients connect over Streamable HTTP or SSE with a bearer token. For stdio-only clients, the bundled mcpgateway.wrapper translates. The docs have client guides for Claude Desktop, GitHub Copilot, Cline and Continue, plus agent frameworks such as LangGraph and CrewAI. Any MCP client should work.

How to connect

Install from PyPI, generate the required secrets, and start the gateway:

pip install mcp-contextforge-gateway
python3 -m mcpgateway.scripts.init_secrets
mcpgateway --host 0.0.0.0 --port 4444

Docker, Docker Compose (with PostgreSQL and Redis) and Helm charts are also documented.

Cost and limits

It is free under Apache-2.0. You host and run it yourself, and it needs Python 3.11+. The README says the container image doesn't support arm64 in production yet, so Apple Silicon users should install from PyPI or use Rosetta.

Safety notes

The gateway won't start without JWT_SECRET_KEY and AUTH_ENCRYPTION_SECRET. Generate real values for both, and don't use placeholder passwords. It stores upstream credentials and OAuth tokens, so limit who can reach the admin UI and API. Binding to 0.0.0.0 exposes it to your network. Put it behind TLS and use RBAC or SSO for shared deployments.