Running from Source

Whether you want to contribute to AutoMobile or just want to run the MCP directly from source, this guide will set you up for the development environment maintainers use.

Build from Source

If you’re about to build AutoMobile from source for the very first time after cloning you should do the following:

npm install
npm run build
npm install -g

Hot Reload

AutoMobile supports multiple transport modes but the only supported use case right now is streamable transport over the mcp-remote npm package. This allows decoupling of the MCP server process from the STDIO interface to continually recompile code as changes are made.

Options

Streamable HTTP (Recommended) - Modern MCP transport with full streaming support:

# Start with hot reloading (ts-node-dev), streamable is the default
npm run dev
npm run dev:streamable

# Custom port
npm run dev:port 8080

Configuration for your favorite MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "AutoMobile": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "mcp-remote",
        "http://localhost:9000/auto-mobile/streamable"
      ]
    }
  }
}