MCP tools
Documented against OpenRig 0.5.14. Help text uses "node" where these pages say seat, for a seat's position in the running rig.
What it is for
An agent that speaks the Model Context Protocol rather than a shell can drive OpenRig through rig mcp serve, which starts an MCP server over stdio and exposes a set of tools that mirror the CLI's main operations: boot and stop rigs, list them, snapshot and restore, discover and bind sessions, validate specs, inspect bundles, send to a seat's terminal, capture output, and use the rig chatroom. The tools return structured JSON. Where a tool changes something, it carries the same guards as the verb it mirrors.
The three things you will do first
Start the server for your agent. Configure the agent's MCP settings to run this command; --port overrides the daemon port.
rig mcp serve
rig mcp serve --port 7433
Discover the tool list from the server itself, not from a page. The list on 0.5.14 has 18 tools; an earlier page said 17 and missed rig_add.
Follow the same loop as the CLI. Boot with rig_up, inspect with rig_ps and rig_rig_nodes, talk with rig_send and rig_capture, snapshot with rig_snapshot_create, stop with rig_down, restore with rig_up again.
Every tool, with its input schema
Generated from the server's own tools/list on 0.5.14, without invoking any tool: see generated/mcp-tools.md (18 tools; required inputs marked; full JSON schemas retained).
The mcp family
| Command | What it does (from help) | Help source |
|---|---|---|
rig mcp |
MCP server for agent integration | mcp.txt |
rig mcp serve |
Start MCP server (stdio transport) | mcp.serve.txt |
What it does not do
- Tools were listed, not called, to produce the reference. Return shapes on the older site page (a dashboard URL from
rig_up, for example) are not confirmed; trust the schema. - The MCP server is hosted by the CLI and needs the daemon running for anything that touches a rig.
- It is not a second control plane. Every tool is a thin call into the same daemon routes the CLI uses.