🚀 MCP Apps in VS Code Insiders: Create and Run Your First App

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Hey developer 👋🏻! This repo implements an MCP server with YouTube tools (get-video, get-channel, get-latest-video) and two MCP Apps (video-render, channel-profile) bundled with Vite into a single HTML file to display them in VS Code Insiders. Learn how to build, serve and consume MCP Apps ❤️

🚀 Features

• get-video: Searches for a video on YouTube by query and returns title, description and thumbnail (base64) with video-render UI
• get-channel: Gets channel info (stats, base64 thumbnail) and displays it with channel-profile UI
• get-latest-video: Returns the latest video from a channel (used in channel-profile)
• UI Apps:
  • video-render: Renders a video card with links
  • channel-profile: Renders channel profile and shows the latest video

📋 Requirements

• Node.js 18+
• npm or yarn
• YouTube Data API v3 key (YOUTUBE_API_KEY)

🛠️ Installation

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/0GiS0/mcp-apps.git
cd mcp-apps

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Configure environment
cp .env-sample .env
# Edit .env and set your YOUTUBE_API_KEY

🏗️ Project Structure

src/
├── server.ts              # MCP Server with Express and YouTube tools
├── services/
│   └── youtube.ts         # YouTube Data API integration logic
└── apps/
    ├── channel-profile/   # Channel profile UI
    │   ├── index.html
    │   ├── app.ts
    │   └── styles.css
    └── video-render/      # Video renderer UI
        ├── index.html
        ├── app.ts
        └── styles.css

🔧 Usage

Build the apps

npm run build

Start the MCP server

npm run serve

The server will start at http://localhost:3001/mcp

Configure in VS Code

Add the following configuration to your .vscode/mcp.json file:

{
  "servers": {
    "my-mcp-server": {
      "url": "http://localhost:3001/mcp"
    }
  }
}

📦 Main Dependencies

• @modelcontextprotocol/sdk - Model Context Protocol SDK
• @modelcontextprotocol/ext-apps - Extension for creating MCP Apps
• express - HTTP Server
• cors - CORS Middleware (runtime)
• vite + vite-plugin-singlefile - App bundling

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