Servers with SSE

The stdio transport, that you've been using so far, enables communication through standard input and output streams. This is particularly useful for local integrations and command-line tools.

Now, we will cover SSE Server-Sent Events (SSE) transport. SSE is a standard for server-to-client streaming, allowing servers to push real-time updates to clients over HTTP. This is particularly useful for applications that require live updates, such as chat applications, notifications, or real-time data feeds. Also, your server can be used by multiple clients at the same time as it lives on a server that can be run somewhere in the cloud for example.

Here's what such a server can look like:

import express, { Request, Response } from "express";
import { McpServer } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/server/mcp.js";
import { SSEServerTransport } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/server/sse.js";

const server = new McpServer({
  name: "example-server",
  version: "1.0.0"
});

// ... set up server resources, tools, and prompts ...

const app = express();

// to support multiple simultaneous connections we have a lookup object from
// sessionId to transport
const transports: {[sessionId: string]: SSEServerTransport} = {};

app.get("/sse", async (_: Request, res: Response) => {
  const transport = new SSEServerTransport('/messages', res);
  transports[transport.sessionId] = transport;
  res.on("close", () => {
    delete transports[transport.sessionId];
  });
  await server.connect(transport);
});

app.post("/messages", async (req: Request, res: Response) => {
  const sessionId = req.query.sessionId as string;
  const transport = transports[sessionId];
  if (transport) {
    await transport.handlePostMessage(req, res);
  } else {
    res.status(400).send('No transport found for sessionId');
  }
});

app.listen(3001);

In the preceding code we set up an Express server that listens to two endpoints:

• /sse: This endpoint is used to establish a connection with the server. When a client connects to this endpoint, a new SSEServerTransport instance is created and added to the transports object. The server then calls server.connect(transport) to start receiving messages from the client.
• /messages: This endpoint is used to handle incoming messages from the client. When a message is received, the server looks up the corresponding SSEServerTransport instance in the transports object and calls transport.handlePostMessage(req, res) to process the message.

Now that we understand what SSE is, how to create such a server, let's practice it in the next activity.