Serve

stdio vs HTTP, the log viewer, port and host options.

pinax serve is the only command an MCP client ever actually launches. It mounts every manifest under ~/.pinax/servers/ as a single MCP server with five tools (list_docs, list_sections, search_pages, get_section_pages, get_page).

stdio (default)

pinax serve

Reads JSON-RPC from stdin and writes to stdout. This is what every MCP client launches when you wire up its config file. You almost never run this in a terminal yourself - point your client at it instead. See the per-client guides under Clients.

To pin a single manifest (useful for client-side resource hygiene):

pinax serve stripe

HTTP + log UI

pinax serve --http --port 8423

Three endpoints are mounted:

http://localhost:8423/ - dark-themed log viewer (every tool call your agent makes, filterable per docs site).
http://localhost:8423/mcp - Streamable HTTP MCP endpoint.
http://localhost:8423/sse - legacy SSE endpoint for older clients.

Use HTTP mode when you want to watch what an agent is actually doing. The log UI keeps history per-manifest and refreshes live.

Bind options

Flag	Default	What it does
`--http`	off	switches from stdio to HTTP transport
`--port`	`8423`	TCP port for the HTTP listener
`--host`	`127.0.0.1`	bind address - keep on loopback by default

The MCP endpoints don’t authenticate, so binding to anything other than 127.0.0.1 makes your indexed docs queryable by anyone on the network.

Unified mode

In a single pinax serve call every tool takes an optional docs argument that scopes the call to one manifest. Omitting it searches across every loaded site at once. Call list_docs to discover what’s loaded.

See MCP tools for the full tool contracts.

Edit this page on GitHub