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Claude Desktop

Anthropic's desktop client supports MCP natively. Add Chordia to its config file and the tools appear in the 🔌 menu.

Configuration

Edit the client config:

  • macOS — ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
  • Linux — ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
  • Windows — %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

Add the chordia-compass entry under mcpServers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "chordia-compass": {
      "transport": "sse",
      "url": "https://mcp.chordia.ai/sse",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APPLICATION_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop after editing.

Verifying

  1. Open a new chat.
  2. Click the 🔌 icon in the message composer.
  3. You should see "Chordia Compass" with 12 tools and 3 resources listed.
  4. Ask the model "what's our compass score this week?" — it'll call get_project_context then get_project_summary automatically.

Common issues

Tools don't appear, no error in UI — open Claude Desktop's MCP log (Help → Show Logs in some versions; check the docs for your version). Look for MCP auth via … server-side; if it's missing, the bearer header isn't reaching the server.

Authentication required — the Authorization header is missing. Make sure your config uses headers, not env. Older config formats varied.

Connection drops mid-session — usually a transport mismatch. We recommend transport: "sse" for now; the server also supports transport: "http" (streamable HTTP) if your client prefers it.

Local testing without exposing the server

If you want to validate locally before pointing customers at a public host:

# In one terminal — start the MCP server
MCP_SERVER_ENABLED=1 bash start.sh

Then point the client at http://localhost:8001/sse instead of the public URL. Same bearer token.