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Announcing the Tigris MCP server

· 6 min read
Xe Iaso
Katie Schilling
Abdullah Ibrahim

One of the great things about modern AI editor workflows is how it makes it easier to get started. Normally when you open a text editor, you have an empty canvas and don’t know where to start. AI tools let you describe what you want and help you get started doing it.

“We’ve all been excited about AI editors making development fast and just plain fun.”

  • Most developers, probably

A robotic blue tiger using tools to work on an engine.

A robotic blue tiger using tools to work on an engine.

Today we’re happy to announce that we’re making it even easier to get started with Tigris in your AI editor workflow. If you want to get to the part where you can plug configs into your AI editor and get started, head to Getting Started and get off to vibe coding your next generation B2B SaaS as a service.

Abdullah just started at Tigris a week ago (Welcome!) and has already built something that will make it easier for you to make object storage a native part of your development workflow: a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Tigris. This enables you to manage your buckets and objects with plain language in your AI capable editor.

Just say “make me a bucket for this project” and it’ll go do that. Want files in the bucket? Just ask it to upload a file; it’ll make it happen.

The vision​

We want your developer experience with Tigris to be as seamless, unsurprising, and natural as possible. What’s more natural than natural language? Getting this set up was a breeze. Tigris is compatible with S3, so all Abdullah had to do was glue S3 calls to the MCP library. Everything was already there, well-tested, and ready to go. And it’s just object storage: there’s no chance you’ll accidentally spin up an expensive service and get a surprise bill.

Of note: many other MCP servers will try and do much more than they need to. Our MCP server just does object storage. There’s no possibility of it spinning up expensive servers and saddling you with a surprise bill with an unreasonable number of zeroes in it.

Getting started​

To get started, create some access keys and then install our MCP server:

Run the init script in your terminal:

npx -y @tigrisdata/tigris-mcp-server init

Then ask your editor to make you a bucket for a project and it will! More instructions are on the official npm package here.

Trust​

AI editors and tooling are really cool, but there’s some key things you should be aware of before you blindly trust this. The Model Context Protocol ecosystem is still very new, so there will almost certainly be problems we solve together over time. There are also inherent risks involved in giving any tool access to your cloud storage accounts or filesystem.

The Model Context Protocol server will run in the same level of sandboxing as your editor does. Be careful with what you install and always double-check what you run before you run it.

In order to make this as safe as possible, we’ve made the Model Context Protocol also available as a docker container. This means you can run it in a sandboxed environment and not have to worry about it having access to your local filesystem. You can run it in a container and container have access to a specific directory on your local filesystem. This is a great way to make sure that the Model Context Protocol server can only access the files you want it to.

Run the init script in your terminal and select Docker as option when prompted

npx -y @tigrisdata/tigris-mcp-server init

This Model Context Protocol server will run with the full power and authority of any credentials you give it. Be very careful about typos with object names that have similar token distances.

Additionally, AI tools are fundamentally built around random behavior and will have unexpected results at times. Sometimes it takes the AI a couple tries to learn what you want to do. Be very careful, as typos in an AI context can have much more drastic consequences than they can in normal contexts. We don’t want you to lose data you need. For example, when you run the DeleteBucket call, you are not allowed to do this unless the bucket has no data in it.

In order to be as transparent as possible, we’ve made our Model Context Protocol server open source and are actively monitoring that repository.

We’re making this as safe and reliable as possible. Part of this is the scope reduction we mentioned earlier: we’re only managing your buckets and objects. The other part is by going out of our way to make this tool as boring as possible. Boring code is easy to understand, easy to maintain, and easy to learn from. We hope that this will help you make the exciting parts of your program while leaving the boilerplate to machines.

We hope this will make using Tigris absolutely frictionless and that you can learn how S3’s API works in the process. Not to mention, we want you to get out there and build things!

Want to vibe code with Tigris?

Kick up some tunes and let the vibes flow! Build the product of your dreams. Tigris will help make it happen!