MCP Server

Topaz ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets AI assistants — such as GitHub Copilot in VS Code — start, stop, and manage the local emulator on your behalf. Instead of running CLI commands manually, you can describe what you need in natural language and let the assistant handle the infrastructure setup.

How it works

The MCP server runs as a stdio process (spawned by your editor or AI tool) and exposes two kinds of capabilities:

• Tools — individual operations the assistant can call (create a resource group, fetch connection strings, check emulator health).
• Prompts — pre-defined multi-step recipes that tell the assistant which tools to call, in which order, and with which parameters to set up a complete scenario in one go.

The server uses the Testcontainers library to pull and manage the Topaz container, so Docker must be running on your machine.

Example workflow

With the MCP server configured in VS Code, you can ask GitHub Copilot to set up your full local environment in a single conversation:

"Start Topaz locally using the latest beta tag, create a subscription called dev-local, add a resource group rg-dev in westeurope, then provision a storage account, a Service Bus namespace with a queue named orders, and a Key Vault with a secret db-password."

Copilot will:

1. Call RunTopazAsContainer to pull and start the emulator
2. Call CreateSubscription to provision the subscription
3. Call CreateResourceGroup to create rg-dev
4. Call CreateStorageAccount, CreateServiceBusNamespace, CreateServiceBusQueue, and CreateKeyVault in sequence

You can then continue using az commands or the Azure SDK against localhost as described in the Azure CLI integration guide.

Once you have provisioned resources, ask Copilot to retrieve all connection strings at once:

"Give me the connection strings for everything in my dev-local subscription."

Copilot will call GetConnectionStrings and return a structured list of URIs and connection strings ready to paste into your application configuration.

If something isn't working as expected, ask the assistant to run a health check:

"Check whether Topaz is running and which services are up."

Copilot will call GetTopazStatus, which hits the health endpoint and probes every service port, so you can immediately see which services are reachable without leaving your editor.