A phone book for AI tools that checks IDs at the door

What it does The registry is a centralized directory for Model Context Protocol servers. It lets developers publish server metadata and lets clients query that catalog, effectively acting as a phone book for AI agent plug-ins. The project ships as a Go service with a PostgreSQL backend and a publisher CLI.

The interesting bit The registry enforces namespace ownership through multiple verification paths—GitHub OAuth, OIDC from GitHub Actions, DNS challenges, or HTTP proofs—so claiming io.github.user/foo actually requires being user. That level of publisher verification is baked in from the preview stage rather than bolted on later.

Key highlights

• API is frozen at v0.1 while the team gathers real-world integration feedback before a v1 GA release
• Supports four authentication methods for publishing, including DNS and HTTP domain verification
• Ships pre-built container images to GHCR with continuous deployment from main
• Includes a dedicated publisher CLI (mcp-publisher) for submitting server metadata
• Development environment seeds from production data by default to mirror live behavior

Caveats

• Still officially in preview; the README warns that breaking changes and data resets may occur before general availability
• The v0.1 API freeze is temporary and explicitly intended to validate integrations before v1

Verdict Worth watching if you are building MCP clients or running a public MCP server and want discoverability. Skip it if you need a battle-tested, stable production dependency today.