Get started using pre-built servers in Claude for Desktop.
~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
%APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
username
with your computer’s username. The paths should point to valid directories that you want Claude to be able to access and modify. It’s set up to work for Desktop and Downloads, but you can add more paths as well.
You will also need Node.js on your computer for this to run properly. To verify you have Node installed, open the command line on your computer.
npx
command to install and run @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem
. This server, described here, will let you access your file system in Claude for Desktop.Server not showing up in Claude / hammer icon missing
claude_desktop_config.json
file syntaxclaude_desktop_config.json
are valid and that they are absolute and not relativeusername
as you did in claude_desktop_config.json
) to see if you get any errors:Getting logs from Claude for Desktop
~/Library/Logs/Claude
%APPDATA%\Claude\logs
mcp.log
will contain general logging about MCP connections and connection failures.
mcp-server-SERVERNAME.log
will contain error (stderr) logging from the named server.
Tool calls failing silently
None of this is working. What do I do?
ENOENT error and `${APPDATA}` in paths on Windows
${APPDATA}
within a path, you may need to add the expanded value of %APPDATA%
to your env
key in claude_desktop_config.json
:npx
command may continue to fail if you have not installed NPM globally. If NPM is already installed globally, you will find %APPDATA%\npm
exists on your system. If not, you can install NPM globally by running the following command: