Skip to main content
Run the Inspector on your own infrastructure when you need full control over your debugging environment. The official Docker image is published at mcpuse/inspector on Docker Hub.

​
Quick start

Then open http://localhost:8080 to access your self-hosted Inspector.
Anyone who can reach the Inspector can use it to connect to and call your MCP servers. The examples bind to 127.0.0.1 so the Inspector is only reachable from the host itself. If you need remote access, put it behind a reverse proxy with authentication and TLS, or restrict access with firewall rules — don’t publish port 8080 on all interfaces.

​
Deployment options

The image is based on node:20-alpine, which ships wget (BusyBox) but not curl — use wget in healthchecks.

​
Ports

The container always listens on port 8080 — the image’s start command pins it with --port 8080, so a PORT environment variable has no effect. To serve on a different host port, remap it with Docker instead:
NODE_ENV=production is already set in the image; no environment variables are required.

​
Air-gapped installation

For hosts without registry access, transfer the image as a tarball:
When connecting from a self-hosted Inspector to an MCP server on another host, the browser must be able to reach the server directly, or you can use the proxy connection mode. See Connection settings for when to use each.

​
Alternatives

Self-hosting is one of three ways to run the Inspector: Servers built with mcp-use also auto-mount the Inspector at /inspector — see the Inspector overview.