---
title: "MCP Description: a portable format for MCP servers"
description: "MCP Description (mcpdesc) is an open, portable format for describing MCP servers — their tools, resources, prompts, transports, security, and metadata."
source: "https://mcpdesc.org/"
---

# Portable descriptions for MCP servers

The {mcpdesc} project is an independent open source initiative promoting an open, portable, machine-readable description format for MCP servers.

[Try it ](/live-editor)[Learn the Format ](/format)[Explore the Tools ](/tools)

September 9, 2026

## mcpdesc v0.8.0 adds support for MCP 2026-07-28

Explore MCP 2026-07-28 support, multi-protocol descriptions, richer examples, reusable components, and more.

[What’s new](/blog/mcp-description-v0-8)

## Benefits

### Accurate Documentation

Generate reliable documentation for tools, resources, prompts, transports, and security from a single source of truth.

### Quality Assurance & Compliance

Lint, validate, and compare MCP Description documents to catch gaps in completeness and consistency before they reach production.

### CI/CD Automation

Store, version, review, and publish MCP Description documents alongside engineering pipelines.

### Conformance Checking

Verify that what a server claims to expose matches what it actually implements.

### Design-First Workflow

Design a server in an MCP Description document, refine the design with a mock service, then generate code from the description.

### Interoperability

One format that ecosystem tools can read, write, validate, render, diff, and generate code from.