How to Plan & Find your MCP Servers + Security

Hey, welcome back to this lesson. We’re looking at MCB and deciding which one fits our projects. I suggest making a brief plan first. We can install many MCB servers, but not every option is helpful.

Imagine we’re building a web application. It usually has a frontend with a user interface, a backend API, a database, and a browser for testing. Each layer might rely on a framework. For instance, React handles the UI, a simple REST API runs the backend, Postgres stores our data, and a browser helps us test. The question is whether we actually need an MCB server for each piece.

It can be useful to add an MCB server if we want to connect an external tool or service. React is covered in many pre-trained language models, so we rarely need a React server. A crawler is more important, since it gathers missing documentation and converts a site into a single markdown file (often called LLM.txt) to keep context size manageable.

For a REST API, we might use a curl MCP to send queries. For Postgres, installing an MCP server lets us check tables, run queries, or see the latest user in the database. This saves time and avoids manual copy-paste tasks.

A browser-based dev tool is handy for logs or errors during development. It collects data from the console without constant switching. This approach streamlines debugging.

Official sources, such as an instructor pro learning hub, list MCP servers. It’s safer to pick ones from Microsoft or GitHub because they often have stronger support and better security. MCP servers can modify files or erase a disk, so stay cautious.

Search these directories and check star ratings, community feedback, and security scans. A well-known open-source repository lowers the chance of hidden malicious code.

In our example, we chose three MCP servers: Fire Crawl for crawling docs, a Postgres server, and a browser dev tool. We skipped anything that didn’t fit our plan. This keeps the setup simple and secure.

Here’s the takeaway: decide which MCP servers you need, rely on trustworthy sources, then add them to your list. In the next lesson, we’ll install them in Cursor. See you then.