Claude Desktop Installation

Speaker 0: Hey. What's up, guys? Brian here from Directus. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to set up the Directus MCP server with clawed desktop. So first and foremost, before we can start working with our direct assistance using the MCP server, we have to install cloud desktop.

So if you don't have that already, you're gonna wanna download the cloud desktop version. This doesn't work with the website. It has to be desktop. So cloud.ai/download, get that set up, and then come back. The next thing that you're gonna want to have installed is Node JS.

This is a JavaScript runtime that basically allows the MCP server to run locally on your computer, which is the most secure way to run MCP servers at this time. So if you go to nodejs.org/en or your language code slash download or just Google install Node, you should get this page, and it should be preconfigured for your specific computer, whether you're on Mac or Windows, but make sure that you've got this thing installed. If you don't, hit pause, go install it, come back to the video. Now with both of those pieces installed, the next thing you're gonna do is open up Claude desktop and go to the settings from the file menu. That's gonna give you a dialogue that looks something like this.

You'll see we have general, we've got give feedback, etcetera. You might see something like cloud settings here, but what we're looking for is the developer tab, and then I'm gonna hit edit config. So this is gonna give me a pointer to this file called claudesktopconfig dot json. And if you're not a developer, don't worry, json might look scary but it is not, I assure you. All we're gonna do here is just tell Claude about our Directus MCP server.

So for now let's just open this up and I'll put these side by side. Any text editor will do. What we're gonna do, we're just gonna copy and paste this code from the documentation for our Directus MCP server. So you could see we've got MCP server here, which is just a a key. Inside that object, we are going to copy Directus MCP.

Cool. We're just gonna paste that in there. Now there's a a couple things that you'll see breaking this down. We got the command and then we have the arguments. This is just to run the actual MCP server.

And then we have this e n v thing. So this is where we set up our specific configuration. And what we're gonna do here, we're gonna now open up our directus instance and I'm gonna go to my user account and I'm going to create a token. So I'll go down to admin options, I'm gonna hit token, I'm gonna create this token, and then I'm going to save the user. Make sure you copy that token, paste it into the configuration here, And then the last thing that you're gonna do is grab the URL for your Directus instance.

So if you're on Directus cloud, like our hosting, this will look like .directus.app. If you are self hosting directus, this is obviously gonna be hosted at your own domain. Now I'm just gonna hit save or command s or, you know, I can go to file, save as here, but I'm gonna save that file. And The next thing I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna quit Claw Desktop and I'm gonna reopen Claw Desktop. And if I've done all those steps properly, I can open up the tool menu and I now see Directus and it has all the tools that I have access to.

And if I have prompts enabled, I can surely see those from here as well. So the MCP server does have some extra configuration that you can add. If you want to enable the prompts collection, which allows you to store and reuse prompts in Cloud Desktop, there is configuration here. Just copy and paste that in from the actual documentation. Follow the same procedure.

Close Cloud, open Cloud, and we should see our tools there. And now I can see some prompts that we can reuse over and over again for different work. So now that we've got everything connected, we could see all of our tools, leverage our different prompts. Let's just actually test this out. Right?

How many files are in my Directus instance? This should make a tool call and query the individual files. One of the nice things that I like about Cloud Desktop is that the, tool calls do show the request and the response, so you could see that. And then we get the summary here. So that is connecting Cloud Desktop to the Directus MCP server.

Make sure you stay tuned for more videos on the MCP of how to actually use this in your day to day workflows.