gitlab-mcp

GitLab MCP fills the gap Anthropic left open. GitHub has an official MCP server for AI coding assistants. GitLab does not. This community-built server connects Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, VS Code, and Codex to your GitLab instance, exposing merge requests, issues, pipelines, wiki, releases, and labels as callable tools.

Setup is simple for local use: one npx command plus a personal access token. Self-hosted GitLab works fine with a custom API URL. For team deployments, there's a Docker image with OAuth2 support and multi-user remote authorization. Four auth methods cover everything from quick local testing to production multi-tenant setups.

Solo developers on GitLab get AI coding assistant integration that was previously GitHub-only. Teams running self-hosted GitLab get the same MCP capabilities without migrating to GitHub. There's a read-only mode toggle for safety if you want to prevent the AI from making changes.

The catch: community-maintained, not official GitLab or Anthropic. Feature parity depends on one maintainer keeping up with GitLab's API surface. The multi-user OAuth setup requires a public HTTPS endpoint and pre-registered GitLab app, which is non-trivial.