Wireshark for MCP. A transparent proxy that shows every real tool call between your AI client and your MCP servers, live in your terminal.
The problem
The official MCP Inspector connects as its own client. It never sees the traffic between your client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Claude Code) and your server. A breakpoint in your own server only fires once a request arrives. It can't show you the call the real client never made, or made with arguments you didn't expect. So when a tool silently isn't called, capabilities don't line up, or a call just hangs, you're back to tail-ing a log in /tmp and guessing.
mcpsnoop sits in the real data path instead, so you can debug the actual MCP traffic between your client and server. Wrap your server command with it and watch every JSON-RPC frame in a live terminal UI as your real client and server talk.
Quick start
Want to see it first, with nothing to set up? Run mcpsnoop demo for a scripted session that plays into the live UI.
To use it for real, wrap your server in your client's MCP config:
Everything after -- is the command that normally launches your server (here, a TypeScript build run with node). Swap in whatever you already use, like python server.py, npx -y @scope/server, or a compiled binary.
Use your client as usual, then open the UI:
mcpsnoop
No flags, no socket paths, no startup order to remember. The shim and the UI find each other on their own, and the UI backfills past sessions from disk, so it doesn't matter whether you open it before or after your client.
For a streamable-HTTP server, run mcpsnoop as a reverse proxy and point your client at it:
mcpsnoop http --target http://localhost:3000/mcp --listen :7000
No server of your own to test against? docs/DEMO.md walks through pointing Claude at a published test server through mcpsnoop.
Features
- Live JSON-RPC stream. Requests, responses, notifications and server stderr, colour-coded, with errors and slow calls flagged, including tool-level
result.isError, not just JSON-RPC errors.
- Replay. Re-run any captured tool call against a fresh, isolated copy of the server. The fastest loop for iterating on a tool.
- Capability inspector (
c). See exactly what the client and server agreed on at the handshake.
- Frame inspector (
enter). Full, pretty-printed JSON with in-frame search.
- Hung-call detection. In-flight requests show
PENDING with a live timer, so a stuck tool is obvious at a glance.
- A real filter query. Narrow the stream with
tool:, status:, dir:, kind:, id: or plain text.
How it compares
|
MCP Inspector |
mcp-trace |
mcpsnoop |
| Sees your real client↔server traffic |
no |
yes |
yes |
| Interactive terminal UI |
no |
yes |
yes |
| Zero-config, no flags or ordering |
no |
no |
yes |
| Capability inspector |
partial |
no |
yes |
| Replay a captured call |
no |
no |
yes |
| Single binary, no runtime deps |
no |
varies |
yes |
Install
go install github.com/kerlenton/mcpsnoop/cmd/mcpsnoop@latest
Or with Homebrew:
brew tap kerlenton/mcpsnoop
brew install mcpsnoop
Recent Homebrew gates third-party taps; if it refuses, trust the tap once with brew trust kerlenton/mcpsnoop and re-run the install.
A tap-free brew install mcpsnoop (no tap, no trust) needs Homebrew core, which only accepts projects past a notability bar (stars, forks, watchers). If you'd find that handy, a star on the repo helps it qualify.
Or grab a prebuilt binary for your platform from the Releases page.
How it works
The official Inspector connects as a second client, off to the side. mcpsnoop sits in the actual pipe, so it sees exactly what your real client and server say to each other, whatever the server is written in.
It's two roles in one binary: mcpsnoop -- <server> is the transparent shim your client spawns (forwarding bytes verbatim while shipping a copy of each frame), and mcpsnoop with no arguments is the hub and TUI. They pair through a well-known socket and on-disk logs, so neither has to start first.
Keybindings
enter drill in · esc back · r replay · c capabilities · y copy · / filter · : command · p pause · f follow · ctrl-d delete. Move with j/k, page with ctrl-f/ctrl-b, g/G for top and bottom, shift+column to sort. Press ? in the app for the full list.
Filtering the stream
In a session, press / and combine space-separated tokens (ANDed): plain text matches the method, tool, id and payload, while tool: method: id: kind: dir: status: filter by field. So tool:search status:slow shows slow calls to a search tool, and dir:s2c kind:req surfaces server-initiated requests (sampling, roots). The ? help lists each token and the values it accepts.
Security
mcpsnoop runs the server command you wrap, so only wrap servers you trust and run untrusted ones in a container. It never executes anything you didn't put in your client config.
Contributing
Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev setup and the make check gate. mcpsnoop is pre-1.0 and follows SemVer: while on 0.x, minor releases may change user-facing behaviour, and patch releases are bug fixes.
License
MIT
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