Refined MCP server for GitHub

[!TIP]
If you haven't read the article The second wave of MCP: Building for LLMs, not developers by Vercel, I highly recommend checking it out to understand why we're building this project.

GitHub's official MCP Server exposes dozens of low-level tools that bloat token usage and are mostly impractical for LLMs. gh-mcp achieves the best of both worlds by providing powerful interfaces: GitHub GraphQL and Code Search, wrapped with smart abstractions.

This project does 3 things differently:

1. Powerful interfaces exposes GraphQL and Code Search instead of atomized endpoints. LLMs already understand these APIs.
2. YAML output makes nested data and file content readable without escaping.
3. Clean abstractions gh handles authentication and low-level details. And LLMs know how to use its --jq option to filter.

Swapping in gh-mcp delivers better performance at lower cost for any GitHub interactions.

Installation

with uv:

uvx mcp-hmr

MCP config:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "gh": {
            "command": "uvx",
            "args": ["gh-mcp"]
        }
    }
}

If you prefer serving it via streamable-http:

uvx gh-mcp --http

[!NOTE]
This project requires gh CLI to be installed and authenticated. Please follow the instructions at cli.github.com to set it up. And then you can login via gh auth login. Check that gh auth status works before using this MCP server.