MCP Tunnels

mcp-tunnels

Connect Claude to an MCP server running inside your private network through an Anthropic MCP tunnel — no inbound ports, no public exposure, no IP allowlisting on your origin. Traffic flows over an outbound-only connection.

Research preview. MCP tunnels is provided "as-is" with no uptime or support commitment and depends on a third-party transport provider (Cloudflare). Review the security model before sending anything sensitive.

Commands

/create-docker-mcp-tunnel [deployment-dir]

Drives the MCP tunnels quickstart end to end on your machine, using Docker Compose with manually supplied credentials (the shortest path for local testing). It walks you through the parts only you can do in the Claude Console and runs everything else for you:

1. Preflight — checks Docker, Docker Compose, OpenSSL, and outbound connectivity.
2. Create the tunnel (Console) — you create it and copy the domain; the token stays out of the chat and goes into a locked-down, gitignored .env.
3. Certificates — generates a CA and a server certificate with OpenSSL, with the exact extensions the tunnel requires.
4. Register the CA (Console) — you upload ca.crt; the tunnel goes Active.
5. Upstream — scaffolds a verifiable FastMCP sample server, or wires up an MCP server you already have.
6. Proxy config + Compose — writes mcp-proxy.yaml and a docker-compose.yaml with digest-pinned images and the cloudflared agent.
7. Start and verify — brings the stack up and checks the proxy and tunnel logs.
8. Call it from Claude — shows you how to reach the server from Managed Agents and the Messages API.

It also carries a troubleshooting matrix (TLS handshake failures, the routes-must-be-a-map gotcha, the tls.key permission issue, the config-is-not-hot-reloaded trap, upstream IP validation) and the operational basics for token rotation and certificate renewal.

Usage:

/create-docker-mcp-tunnel
/create-docker-mcp-tunnel ~/work/my-tunnel