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Wire CANarchy into Claude Desktop or Claude Code

Goal

Run canarchy as an MCP server so an agent can call CANarchy commands directly. This is the quick-start; see MCP Install for the canonical reference with OS-specific paths, generic-client configuration, and troubleshooting.

Prerequisites

  • CANarchy installed and on your PATH (canarchy --version works).
  • Claude Desktop or Claude Code installed.

Verify the MCP server runs

canarchy mcp serve --help

You should see the standard CLI envelope describing the MCP stdio server. The server speaks Model Context Protocol over stdin and stdout; do not run it interactively unless you are piping JSON-RPC into it.

Claude Desktop

Add the following block to your claude_desktop_config.json. On macOS this is ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json; on Windows it is %AppData%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "canarchy": {
      "command": "canarchy",
      "args": ["mcp", "serve"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. The CANarchy tools should appear in the tool picker.

Claude Code

Add CANarchy as an MCP server via the project or user-scoped MCP configuration. The exact location depends on the Claude Code version; the config block has the same shape as above:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "canarchy": {
      "command": "canarchy",
      "args": ["mcp", "serve"]
    }
  }
}

Verify from an agent

Ask the agent to call canarchy capture-info against an in-tree fixture:

Run canarchy capture-info on tests/fixtures/j1939_heavy_vehicle.candump and summarise the result.

The agent should invoke the MCP tool and return the canonical envelope.

Where to go next