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MCP proxy

An MCP Proxy routes Model Context Protocol traffic to MCP servers. MCP is a protocol that enables AI assistants to interact with external tools and data sources. With MCP Proxies, you can:

  • Expose MCP servers through a centralized gateway
  • Apply authentication and access control to MCP traffic
  • Manage multiple MCP servers from a single control plane

This page takes you through deploying a proxy and routing your first MCP traffic through it.

Prerequisites

  • A running AI Gateway, with ADMIN_USERNAME and ADMIN_PASSWORD exported in the shell you run these commands from. See Install the gateway.
  • The sample MCP server below joins the gateway's Compose network as ai-gateway_gateway-network, so start the gateway with docker compose -p ai-gateway up. If you started it under a different project name, use that project's network name in the docker run command.

The curl commands on this page pipe their YAML payload in through a shell heredoc (--data-binary @- <<'EOF'), which PowerShell doesn't support. On Windows, either run them from Git Bash or WSL, or save the YAML between the EOF markers to a file and post that file explicitly — note the .exe, since curl is an alias for Invoke-WebRequest in Windows PowerShell:

curl.exe -X POST http://localhost:9090/api/management/v1/mcp-proxies `
  -H "Content-Type: application/yaml" `
  -u "${env:ADMIN_USERNAME}:${env:ADMIN_PASSWORD}" `
  --data-binary "@mcp-proxy.yaml"

Deploy an MCP proxy configuration

Start the sample MCP server

docker run -p 3001:3001 --name everything --network ai-gateway_gateway-network rakhitharr/mcp-everything:v3

Run the following command to deploy the MCP proxy.

curl -X POST http://localhost:9090/api/management/v1/mcp-proxies \
  -H "Content-Type: application/yaml" \
  -u "$ADMIN_USERNAME:$ADMIN_PASSWORD" \
  --data-binary @- <<'EOF'
apiVersion: gateway.api-platform.wso2.com/v1
kind: Mcp
metadata:
  name: everything-mcp-v1.0
  annotations:
    "gateway.api-platform.wso2.com/project-id": "default"
spec:
  displayName: Everything
  version: v1.0
  context: /everything
  specVersion: "2025-06-18"
  upstream:
    url: http://everything:3001
  tools: []
  resources: []
  prompts: []
EOF
To test MCP traffic routing through the gateway, add the following URL to your MCP client and connect to the server.

http://localhost:8080/everything/mcp

View the MCP proxy in AI Workspace

The gateway syncs the artifacts you deploy on it up to AI Workspace, the control plane for AI traffic across your organization. The everything-mcp-v1.0 proxy you deployed above appears there without being re-declared, in the default project named in its project-id annotation. See Manage Gateway-deployed AI artifacts in AI Workspace.

Policies

The policies that authenticate callers, authorize individual tools, restrict and rename the tool list, and rate limit MCP calls are covered in MCP governance.

Next steps

  • Stop the sample MCP backend when you're done with it: docker stop everything and docker rm everything.
  • Govern this proxy alongside every other AI artifact you run: AI Workspace overview