[Suggestion] Fusion MCP server and background server

[pandaiolo]

Hey

Thanks for the extension and MCP server, this is awesome!

I, like other people here, have been confused with the 3 components setup, getting stuck after installing the Chrome Extension and the MCP Server in Cursor.

I missed the background server.

This is also a bit inconvenient, so I have a suggestion, that I don't know if it's feasible:

1. Integrate the background server within the MCP server
2. When Cursor starts, and MCP Server, it tries to launch the background server
3. If a new cursor instance also tries to run the server, it sees it's already running (port taken) so it aborts
4. If the instance running the server is closed, then another instance would try to restart it upon calling a tool

Would that work? I can contribute if it does

[pandaiolo]

Perhaps not just checking the port, but identity response to make sure it's the right server...

[tedjames]

Love the idea! And yes - this seems to have caused issues with a TON of folks especially since a lot of folks using this tool are relatively new to programming. Three things to setup is definitely too much... If we could fuse the MCP server and local node server that would be amazing!

Few downsides that come to mind:

• MCP servers now control the local node server which means that users can't see the logs from their local node server which helps us to debug issues / validate if logs are actually being sent to the server
• If the MCP server control the local node server, then we need to make sure it's reasonably fault tolerant. As in, the logic for spawning an process with our local node server needs to work really well.

Long story short, let's give it a shot!

I'm currently traveling through Japan and have very limited time for the next 2 weeks to help out a bunch on this. But if you could try to integrate this, I'd be happy to test it out and provide some feedback as you work on it! We can merge it into staging along with some of the other remaining PRs and prep for a 1.3 release that we can slate for mid-April so we have some time to test things out.

Few more thoughts on the implementation...

1. We should have a flag in the command to disable this like: --disable-node-server. That way, if someone is running into problems, we can ask them to disable this and run the local node server in a terminal instead to give us more insight into what's going on.
2. We should definitely have a way to retry the instantiation of a server in case that fails.
3. We should also add an "Install MCP Server" button or section of some sort in our chrome extension that lets users copy the config needed to install our MCP server into their IDE (will be different for each IDE though)

Let me know what you think and if you want to jump on a quick call or DM me for a faster response, hmu on X at @tedx_ai

Thanks again for the suggestion!! Excited to see this in action 😎

[BLamy]

You can create a wrapper script that starts both.

#140 (comment)