By Amit Jotwani
Last week, we announced the new DigitalOcean MCP Server - a tool that connects Claude Desktop (or IDEs like Cursor, or Windsurf) to your DigitalOcean account so it can actually do things: deploy apps, fetch logs, restart services, and more.
In this post, we’ll walk through how to set it up with Claude Code - Anthropic’s terminal-based CLI. Claude Code runs locally in your terminal and has access to your current project folder, which makes it perfect for things like deploying apps with context using MCP servers.
Note: If you’re new to MCP and wondering what this all unlocks, check out our high-level intro: MCP 101: An Introduction to Model Context Protocol, and MCP Server in Python — Everything I Wish I’d Known on Day One.
We’ll set up the server using the default (local) scope, verify it’s working, and run our first natural language prompt. Let’s dive in.
Step 1: Get Your DigitalOcean API Token
The MCP server needs permission to interact with your DigitalOcean account. To do that, you’ll need a personal access token with App Platform access.
- Go to DigitalOcean’s API Tokens page
- Click Generate New Token
- Give it a name like
mcp-server-token - Make sure it has App Platform scopes (read/write)
- Copy and save the token somewhere safe—you’ll need it shortly
Step 2: Install Claude Code CLI
If you haven’t already installed Claude Code, follow the instructions here to set it up.
Once installed, confirm it’s working:
claude --help
You should see a list of Claude’s CLI commands:
Step 3: Add the DigitalOcean MCP Server (Local Scope)
Let’s add the DigitalOcean MCP server using the default scope—which is local. This means the server will be available only to you inside your current folder (private to you in this project).
Run the following command (replace the token):
claude mcp add digitalocean-mcp-local \
-e DIGITALOCEAN_API_TOKEN=YOUR_DO_API_TOKEN \
-- npx "@digitalocean/mcp"
What’s happening here:
digitalocean-mcp-localis the name you’re giving the server (you can name it anything)-esets an environment variable for the token--separates Claude flags from the server commandnpx "@digitalocean/mcp"runs the official server without needing a separate install
Step 4: Check the Server
You can list your registered servers with:
claude mcp list
You should see digitalocean-mcp-local listed.
To see its full configuration:
claude mcp get digitalocean-mcp-local
If you don’t see it, or if something went wrong, double-check your token and make sure Claude Code is installed correctly.
Step 5: Try a Prompt
Now that everything is set up, run Claude:
claude
Then try a natural language request like:
List all my apps on DigitalOcean
or
Create a new app from this GitHub repo: https://github.com/do-community/do-one-click-deploy-flask
Claude will ask you to approve the tool call. Say yes, and watch it go to work.
What’s Next
You now have Claude Code wired up to your DigitalOcean account using the MCP server. You can:
- Deploy apps from GitHub repos
- Check logs and environments
- Restart or delete services
Curious what else you can do with it? We walk through the full workflow—connecting Claude to DigitalOcean, building and deploying a React app, pulling logs, and more in this video:
The video shows how to do it in Cursor, but everything you see there works exactly the same in Claude Code. The MCP server and tool calls are identical.
For a complete list of tools and capabilities of the DigitalOcean MCP server, check out DigitalOcean MCP Server on GitHub.
Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.
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