Get Started with Docker

Set up with Docker

1. Create one configuration file to manage all your MCP servers:

• Create a configuration file mcp.json.
• MCPX will use the /lunar/mcpx/packages/mcpx-server/config/mcp.json file for centralized configuration management.

2. Copy the following configuration example into mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "time": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["mcp-server-time", "--local-timezone=America/New_York"]
    }
  }
}

This configuration uses a single MCP server, "time", that requires no credentials, for quick-start set up.

3. In your directory, run MCPX with the following configuration, exposing ports 9000 and 3000:

docker run --rm --name mcpx -v ./:/mcpx/packages/mcpx-server/config -p 9000:9000 -p 3000:3000 us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/prj-common-442813/mcpx/mcpx:latest

Exposing port 3000 is optional and used for Prometheus metrics scraping.

Congratulations!

You have now set up your MCPX. You should see the following lines to indicate a successful installation:

MCPX server started on port 9000 

Advanced Features

To enable advanced container features, such as running Docker inside a container (Docker-in-Docker) or managing iptables rules, your container must be granted elevated privileges.

• Use --privileged when running Docker inside a container (DinD).
• Use --cap-add=NET_ADMIN to manipulate network settings like iptables.

These flags grant additional Linux capabilities to the container:

--privileged gives the container full access to host devices and all capabilities. This is required for DinD since it needs access to low-level kernel features.

--cap-add=NET_ADMIN is more restrictive and grants only the ability to configure networking, for example, to add firewall rules using iptables.

note

Always prefer fine-grained access like --cap-add=NET_ADMIN over --privileged unless absolutely necessary, as the latter significantly broadens the container’s access to the host. For more on Docker security and capabilities, see the Docker documentation on runtime privileges and capabilities and the Linux manual pages on capabilities.

Control Plane

You can access the MCPX Control Plane Docker installation instructions here.

Once you have an instance running you can navigate to http://localhost:5173/ in your preferred browser.