use environment variables

[FrancoisBlavoet]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

you can define the github MCP like this:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "github-mcp": {
            "command": "npx",
            "args": [
                "-y",
                "@modelcontextprotocol/server-github"
            ],
            "env": {
                "GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN": "<MySecretTokenHere>"
            }
        }
    }
}

a recent cursor update has added the possibility to define an mcp.json scoped to a project, which is great.
However, I want to commit this mcp file to the project’s repo … but I don’t want to commit my secret token.

Proposed solution

Could we add the option to actually refer to an env variable here?
Alternatively, if I could at least enter a file path there like "GITHUB_TOKEN_PATH": "~./.github_token", that would work too

[VladyslavXXI]

@FrancoisBlavoet I had the same issue.

Managed to solve it with the following config:

{
  "servers": {
    "github" : {
      "command": "docker",
      "envFile": "${workspaceFolder}/.env",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "-e",
        "GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN",
        "ghcr.io/github/github-mcp-server"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Using docker here, but that doesn't matter - should work for npx as well.

The main change here is that

"env": {
                "GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN": "<MySecretTokenHere>"
            }

is deleted, and the following one is added instead:

"envFile": "${workspaceFolder}/.env",

And my .env file contains the variable named GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN with a valid token assigned to it.

Hope that helps!

[FrancoisBlavoet]

thank you @VladyslavXXI . I ended up using this for now:

#!/bin/bash
set -a
source ~/.env
set +a

npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-github

very hacky ..
Apparently work is planned for cursor to handle multi users in a saner fashion