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Getting started

This tutorial gets you from a clean checkout to an LLM client that can call CAD tools. Ten minutes, two paths: local stdio or a deployed HTTP endpoint.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • uv installed
  • A checkout of the mcdrafter repository
  • An MCP client — the examples use the claude CLI

FreeCAD is not required for this tutorial. The six DXF analysis tools run on pure Python dependencies, which uv resolves automatically.

Path A: local stdio

Section titled “Path A: local stdio”

The stdio transport is the simplest way to wire the server into Claude Code. The client spawns the server as a subprocess and talks JSON-RPC over stdin/stdout.

Terminal window
claude mcp add mcdrafter -- \
  uv run --directory /path/to/mcp-drafter cad-mcp-server --transport stdio

That’s it. uv run resolves the environment from pyproject.toml on first launch, and the cad-mcp-server console script starts the FastMCP app.

Verify the connection:

Terminal window
claude mcp list

Then, in a Claude session, ask something that forces a tool call:

Use mcdrafter’s list_supported_formats tool and summarize what this server can do.

You should get back the import/export format tables and the capability list.

Path B: a deployed HTTP endpoint

Section titled “Path B: a deployed HTTP endpoint”

If the server is running somewhere (see Run with Docker), point your client at its HTTP transport. FastMCP serves the MCP endpoint at /mcp:

Terminal window
claude mcp add --transport http mcdrafter https://cad.example.com/mcp

The server runs HTTP with json_response=True and stateless_http=True, which matters more than it sounds: remote clients behind TLS-terminating reverse proxies get plain JSON responses with no SSE accept-header or session-ID requirements. If you’ve fought an MCP server that works locally but breaks behind Caddy or nginx, this is the fix.

Running the HTTP server directly for a quick test:

Terminal window
uv run cad-mcp-server --transport http --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

First real call

Section titled “First real call”

With either path connected, try a file. Any DXF will do — if you don’t have one handy, ask the agent to create one first with create_2d_geometry (FreeCAD tier) or grab any sample DXF:

Survey the layers in /path/to/site-plan.dxf and tell me which ones carry the most linework.

The agent should call survey_dxf_layers and come back with a busiest-first layer inventory. From there, the Investigate an unknown DXF tutorial walks the full reconnaissance workflow.

Where to next

Section titled “Where to next”