Remote MCP Server w/ Image Download - is it possible?

[coderaven]

So, I did try deploying the server remotely and then use the MCP to my IDE (cursor), it works in a sense that it was able to call the tool and get response and data from it.

Where it fails tho is when downloading images, in the tool call it says:
"Success, 1 images downloaded: /home/projects/myapp/public/images/sample.png"

But there's actually now file downloaded or added in that directory.
The rest works like a charm tho.

[GLips]

I was just mulling this over earlier today. It is not possible to have a remote MCP download a file locally. You'll want to disable that tool entirely.

It's possible you could update the tool to instruct the LLM to download files individually via curl on the command line or something, but that's a pretty unsatisfactory answer imo.

Curious—what use case do you have for running it remotely?

[coderaven]

I see, perhaps we can have a tool just download the image (and put it in the mcp server's working directory for example), then the client to just curl those images in so that it can get to the client machine?

In any case, use-case we have for this is that we are currently "unifying" all Company-vetted MCPs that our devs would use into one Proxy MCP (with our own custom tools as well).

This simplifies MCP installation to just one setup and we ensure Devs are following the standards.
By utilizing MCP auth, we also are able to show or hide tools depending on who is currently calling our MCP server.