finer grain toolset selection (tool level)

[xxchan]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

After limiting "GITHUB_TOOLSETS": "issues,pull_requests,repos", there are still too many tools available

Benefits:

• avoid pollute context window
• avoid unwanted, dangerous tools (e.g., merge_pull_request)

Some example use cases:

• In some use cases, I only want the MCP to do research, so I want "read only" tools, e.g., search issues, search PRs. No need to use update/create tools at all.
• Sometimes it's write only, e.g., "create an issue for me"
• In tools like cursor, it has native search_code tool, so it's duplicative.

Proposed solution

• allow tool level selection --tools
• Or maybe add ability to disable tools, if you think that's better. --disable-tools

[williammartin]

Hey @xxchan, a couple of notes.

Re: read-only tools, you can set the --read-only flag, or GITHUB_READ_ONLY (I think) env var.

Re: finer grained tools, have you tried using the dynamic tool selection feature? https://github.com/github/github-mcp-server?tab=readme-ov-file#dynamic-tool-discovery. We're interested in feedback on it.

Thanks.

[xxchan]

@williammartin Yes, I've noticed dynamic tool discovery, but it's granularity is still "toolset", instead of individual tools, so I guess the points in the OP cannot be fully solved.

[harupy]

+1

[tonytrg]

That should be handled on the host tooling side, selectively disabling what you do not want.

[eden881]

That should be handled on the host tooling side, selectively disabling what you do not want.

Thanks. While this works, I still think it's not the best way to solve this.
Manually disabling tools is tedious and sometimes this needs to be done repeatedly across many repos, for example in cases where you use a separate mcp.json file in each repo.

Maybe we could allow GITHUB_TOOLS and X-MCP-Tools similarly to toolsets?