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Alginte ships a built-in Model Context Protocol server: AI agents (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and any other MCP client) can inspect your Kafka cluster through the same service layer the UI uses — list and describe topics, read consumer-group lag, check connectors and schemas, and sample messages.
Requires Alginte 0.6.0 or newer. The MCP tool set is read-only and included in the free Community edition. Nothing on the MCP surface can create, delete, or modify anything.

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Endpoint

The server speaks Streamable HTTP at /mcp on the regular application port — same process, same port, same network reachability as the UI:
There is nothing to enable — it is on by default. To switch the whole surface off:

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Connecting a client

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Claude Code

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Claude Desktop

Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, with the same URL.

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With authentication enabled

If the optional login is on, /mcp requires the same credentials over HTTP Basic — MCP clients send them as a header:
With an OIDC-only login there is no header credential an MCP client can send. To use MCP on an OIDC-protected instance, also configure the username/password login — or keep the instance inside its network boundary with the login off.

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Tools

By default every tool is read-only (readOnlyHint) and honors the same settings as the REST API — for example, sensitive config values stay masked unless the operator enabled ALGINTE_SHOWSENSITIVECONFIG. An instance in sandbox mode adds the tools that deploy and reset stream designs. The Connect and Schema Registry tools need their upstream URLs configured, exactly like the corresponding UI areas.

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Sampling messages

consume_messages fetches up to 500 messages (default 20) without joining a consumer group or committing anything — it never affects your applications. The seekType argument picks the window: Newest (default), Oldest, OffsetGE / OffsetLE (from an offset), After / Before (from a timestamp). Key and value deserializers default to String; JSON, numeric types, Bytes, and the Schema-Registry-backed JSONSchema / Avro / Protobuf are available.

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Sandbox mode: the stream tools

The playground runs Alginte in sandbox mode (alginte.sandbox.enabled=true): its stack is nobody’s shared cluster, and everything an agent does there is undone by docker compose down. In that mode the MCP endpoint also offers the tools an agent needs to work the Streams builder the way a person does: propose a design, read what the deploy gate refuses, deploy, watch, and start over. The mutating tools carry destructiveHint; MCP clients that confirm destructive calls will ask before each. They answer refusals as data, never as tool errors, so an agent can read the reason and try again, and the preview it reasons from is the one the fidelity corpus holds to the deployed runtime.
Sandbox mode is for an isolated stack only. Never set alginte.sandbox.enabled=true on an instance that runs against a shared cluster: the tools deploy, stop and delete streams and can remove their state from that cluster. Sandbox mode is a Community capability; mutation against a shared cluster is not part of it.

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Security notes

The MCP endpoint binds like every other route — it is inside the same deployment boundary as the UI, and the login (when enabled) covers it. One consideration specific to agents: content an agent reads from Kafka (message payloads, connector configs, schema documents) is untrusted input to that agent’s context. Outside sandbox mode the read-only tool design bounds the blast radius — there is nothing destructive an injected instruction could call — and in sandbox mode the blast radius is the isolated stack itself. Review your MCP client’s own confirmation settings before pointing agents at sensitive clusters.