Alph

Alph is a universal manager for MCP (Model Context Protocol) configurations. It detects installed AI agents and helps you wire them to your MCP server with atomic writes, timestamped backups, and optional rollback on error, all without sending data over the network during the write. Alph supports multiple transport methods (STDIO, HTTP, SSE) and can automatically install local tooling for STDIO-based interactions, making it a convenient one-command solution for configuring agents like Gemini CLI, Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, Codex CLI, and Kiro. The CLI guides you through selecting a target MCP server, the agents you want to connect, and the transport that best suits your environment, then writes validated configurations to disk in a safe, versioned manner.

To use Alph, run the interactive setup (alph or alph setup) to detect installed agents and preview changes, or run a non-interactive one-liner to configure specific agents against a given MCP server endpoint. Alph will auto-detect available agents, choose an appropriate transport per agent, and output a backup-backed, atomic configuration write. If something goes wrong, Alph can automatically roll back to the previous working state. This makes it easy to connect multiple agents to a server in a single command and keep local MCP configurations consistent across tools and OSes.

Prerequisites

• Node.js v18 or newer installed on your machine
• npm (comes with Node.js) or npx

Install and run (temporary using npx)

• No permanent install needed for quick trials: npx @aqualia/alph-cli@latest

Permanent installation (recommended for regular use)

• Global installation with npm: npm install -g @aqualia/alph-cli
• Run Alph from anywhere: alph

Alternative installation methods (via npm package manager)

• If you prefer using a local project, install as a dev dependency and run via npx or an npm script: npm install @aqualia/alph-cli --save-dev npx alph --help

Tips and notes:

• Alph operates locally and writes are atomic with timestamped backups to prevent data loss.
• Use the interactive mode to detect agents and preview changes before writing configurations.
• For STDIO transport, Alph can auto-install the needed local tool unless you disable it with --no-install.
• You can control the atomic write strategy with the ALPH_ATOMIC_MODE environment variable (e.g., ALPH_ATOMIC_MODE=copy).
• Supported agents include Gemini CLI, Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, Codex CLI, and Kiro, with various supported transports (STDIO, HTTP, SSE).
• If working with remote MCP servers, ensure you supply a valid --mcp-server-endpoint and authentication token via --bearer when needed.