GitHub MCP Server

What it does

The GitHub MCP server gives your AI agent direct programmatic access to GitHub. Your agent can read code, open issues, create pull requests, search repositories, and commit files — all through natural language.

This is GitHub’s official MCP server, published by GitHub, Inc.

Installation

# Requires a GitHub Personal Access Token
# Set it as an environment variable:
export GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN=ghp_...

# Run via npx:
npx -y @github/github-mcp-server

Claude Desktop configuration

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@github/github-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN": "ghp_your_token_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Token scopes required

Your PAT needs the following scopes depending on what you want your agent to do:

Use a fine-grained PAT scoped to specific repositories for production use.

Key capabilities

• Code read: get_file_contents retrieves file content at any ref
• Search: search_code and search_repositories use GitHub’s search API
• Issues: Create, list, get, comment on issues
• Pull requests: Open PRs, read diffs, list reviews
• Commits: List and inspect commits, push file changes

Rate limits

GitHub’s REST API allows 5,000 requests/hour for authenticated requests. Heavy agentic workflows (many search_code calls) can hit this limit — plan your agent’s usage accordingly.