Setting up MCP: Start Building Today

Speaker 0: Alright. I'm here with Lindsay from our team. And in this segment, we're gonna show you how to connect the Directus Native MCP to your LLM or your AI tools of choice. Lindsey, do you want to walk us through the process?

Speaker 1: Yeah. So the first step is enabling it. So you'll wanna go to your Directus instance, go into settings, and then navigate to the AI section. And here's where you'll set up your MCP server. So you'll just click enable.

If you want the prompt collection, you can turn it on here, or if you already have it, you can find it and tell us what it is. And then make sure you click that save at the top. Decide if you wanna allow deleting as well.

Speaker 0: And what is our next step after we've enabled the MCP?

Speaker 1: Yes. So now this is important. You'll wanna set up a new user so that you can set up a clean token with the access permissions you need for your MCP. So we're gonna give it administrator right now, but you might want it to give it slightly tighter permissions if you wanna keep it from doing everything. We're gonna do this because we're gonna have it messing with the schema.

Speaker 0: Alright. So now we've got our token. We are ready to connect to, our tools of choice. What are we gonna start with first, Lindsay?

Speaker 1: So let's do cursor. So that's one of our easiest ones. If you go to our docs, we actually have a one click button to get you started there. So find the cursor section in our docs, scroll down, and click a button. It's gonna open up your cursor, and you'll just fill in the settings here.

So you'll wanna put in your URL for your instance, and then this is where you'll grab that token that you created from your user.

Speaker 0: Alright. And I think we'll just hit install.

Speaker 1: And there you go. You're good

Speaker 0: to go. And we we can see we are connected, and then we are ready to chat. And as you can see, the Directus MCP is connected to cursor, and we are actually picking up the schema. Alright. So that is how you connect the native MCP to Cursor.

Super easy to get started. Make sure you check it out.

Speaker 1: But what about marketers? They typically use chat g p t five or something similar.

Speaker 0: That's a a great question, Lizzie. So let me show you just how easy it is to connect to ChatGPT. Again, once you've got that token, all you need to do is log in to ChatGPT. In the bottom, you'll go to your specific settings. You'll look for apps and connectors, and you have to be in developer mode, which sounds scary.

It's really just, a beta feature that they have for protection, and security. So once you activate developer mode, then you can go in and add your own MCP. They're called custom connectors. So we'll just add Directus. We'll give it our URL here.

There we go. Simplecmsstarter.directus.app/mcp. And then we're going to add a question mark access underscore token, and then you're going to paste that same access token that you have. We're going to choose no authentication, and then we just hit create. There we go.

And now I should be able to chat. So we'll just ask it what our Directus schema looks like. It should pick up the available tools through the MCP, and it'd be able to understand my full schema inside Directus. Again, super simple to connect with ChatGPT, and happy MCP ing.

Speaker 1: If you have any feedback for us or any questions, head over to community.directus.io and let us know.