How to Add a New MCP Server to Cursor

In recent months, Cursor has been dominating the AI code assistant and Agentic AI for software development.

There’s a lot going for Cursor. Even though some look down at it as “just a VS Code fork” it is providing a truly AI-native engineering workflow that includes its Cursor Tab as the center of powering its AI promise. 

Cursor’s developer experience aesthetics go beyond just editing files and extend to launching terminal commands and taking a truly autonomous workflow for software development. What could be missing? Well, perhaps the new AI buzzword on the block - MCP, but don’t worry, Cursor has you covered for that, too.

MCP Servers in Cursor

Cursor supports MCP servers in two scopes:

• A globally defined MCP server that will service the agentic chat in Cursor Tab throughout all projects.

• A locally defined MCP server that will be used only within the current project.

Adding a new global MCP server to Cursor means defining its entry in the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file, which is scoped at the user’s home directory level (the special character ~ resolves to the user’s home directory, such as /home/lirantal or /Users/lirantal or other, depending on your operating system and setup).

In other cases, though, you may want to define an MCP server at the project level so that the tools it exposes are specifically available in the Cursor Tab chat interface for that one project.

In this case, Cursor follows familiar dot configuration files by reading various configuration files from the .cursor/ directory in the root of the current project. As you’d expect, one of them is for MCP server definitions: .cursor/mcp.json.

As an example, to define an MCP Server that is built in Node.js and runs through the STDIO transport type, you define the following in .cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "node-api-docs": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/Users/lirantal/projects/repos/mcp-server-nodejs-docs/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Once you have defined it, you can open the MCP Servers page in the Cursor Settings view and confirm the new MCP server is connected and the list of tools it defines:

Which MCP Servers to add?

On a side note, you might wonder which MCP servers to add? What benefits do they provide? Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• Biased, but still, a must for software development is the Snyk MCP Server. These come in handy for secure software development, allowing agentic AI to audit dependencies and source code to ensure they are free of security vulnerabilities.

• If you’re doing product management, I highly recommend taking a look at this curated list of 7 MCP Servers for Product Managers

MCP Servers available in Cursor Tab

You can also interactively investigate the tools available by prompting in Cursor Tab’s chat along the lines of “List the tools you have available” which would result in something like this:

Security concerns when adding MCP Servers

As far as AI Security goes, MCP Servers have their own bucket of risks and concerns that might have you concerned, just to touch on a few of them:

1. Malicious MCP Servers—How do you know if the MCP Server you just installed and spawned is legitimate and doesn’t have any backdoors, trojans or other malicious intent?

2. Vulnerable MCP Servers—Did you audit every line of code and every dependency of an MCP Server to ensure that it’s free of programming errors that could lead to security vulnerabilities that can be weaponized against you?

These are just the start. Other attack vectors can be seemingly legitimate MCP servers that use subtle prompt injection techniques to steer the AI in a specific context or even manipulate them to trigger tool calls.

See the following recommended reading list if you’d like to catch up on more AI Security learnings:

• ChatGPT and Secure Coding? This article summarizes the benefits and security vulnerabilities of ChatGPT-generated code that you should be aware of.

• Heard about RAG? Ok, but have you given any thought to securing RAG? Read that.