Client compatibility

The dependable compatibility contract is capability-based, not a hard-coded client version matrix. Client releases change independently, so verify the features you need in the current client rather than relying on an old “yes/no” table.

Minimum contract

A client can use discord-mcp’s core surface when it can:

1. start a local process as an MCP server;
2. communicate with it over stdio;
3. pass DISCORD_TOKEN and other environment variables; and
4. list and call MCP tools.

That contract is enough for the 192 Discord tools. Resources, subscriptions, and sampling are optional extensions with narrower use cases.

Feature requirements

discord-mcp feature	Client capability	Behavior when absent
Discord tool catalog	tools	Core functionality is unavailable.
Components V2 schema/template catalog	resources list/read	Use the tool reference and builder tools instead.
Live Gateway notifications	resource subscriptions	The client cannot receive push updates; REST tools still work.
Intelligence tools	sampling	The tool returns a host-processing fallback payload rather than a completed LLM analysis.
Confirmation gate	none beyond tools	The __confirm contract is a tool argument; discord-mcp does not use MCP elicitation.

Caution

The server currently advertises subscription support even when Gateway mode is not active. Treat live subscriptions as experimental and verify an actual update end-to-end before building a workflow around them.

Generate the client config

Claude Desktop

discord-mcp init --client claude-desktop

Merge the generated entry into Claude Desktop’s mcpServers object and fully restart the app.

Claude Code

discord-mcp init --client claude-code

Merge the output into the user or project MCP config supported by your Claude Code release.

Cursor

discord-mcp init --client cursor

Merge the output into Cursor’s user or project MCP config and restart the editor.

Generic MCP

discord-mcp init --client generic

Place the standard mcpServers entry where your client documents local stdio servers.

If you did not install the CLI globally, the scoped one-off command is npx --yes @discord-mcp/cli@latest. Do not substitute an unscoped package name.

Verify instead of assuming

For every client and release:

1. Run discord-mcp doctor --online in a terminal with DISCORD_TOKEN set.
2. Restart the client and confirm users_get_current succeeds.
3. Confirm channels_list can discover a test channel.
4. If you need intelligence, run its smallest example and inspect whether the response is a completed result or a host-processing fallback.
5. If you need Gateway events, verify one real subscription update after starting with --gateway; do not infer support from the initialization capability alone.

Server-side controls

• MCP_CATEGORIES limits which tool categories are registered.
• MCP_DRY_RUN affects only tools that declare the confirmation precondition.
• OTEL_ENABLED changes server-side observability, not the client capability contract.

Continue with Client setup, the sampling architecture, or Gateway architecture.