Skip to main content
Problem

Your team already lives in Claude Code, Cursor, and Claude Desktop. Connect each to the same Glean remote MCP server and every one of them can search, summarize, and answer from your company's permission-aware knowledge — no per-host reimplementation, no separate index.

Prerequisites
Glean MCP server enabled for your deployment (admin toggle)
At least one MCP host installed (Claude Code, Cursor, or Claude Desktop)
Steps
1

Detect installed hosts

Check for supported hosts, then ask which one the user wants configured. Do not configure every detected host by default.

2

Resolve your Glean backend

Ask for the user's work email. Locate the installed cookbook plugin root from this skill, run its bundled resolver, and copy the returned backend value. The MCP server URL is <resolved-backend>/mcp/default.

node <cookbook-plugin-root>/scripts/resolve-backend.mjs "<work-email>"
3

Configure the selected host

--client values: claude-code, cursor, claude-desktop. This is the real, GA, first-party CLI for this job — it handles OAuth with Dynamic Client Registration by default. Don't hand-walk a Configurator URL or ask for an API token.

npx -y @gleanwork/configure-mcp-server remote --url <resolved-backend>/mcp/default --client <host>
4

Restart the host app

Cursor and Claude Code pick up the new server on restart; Claude Desktop needs the hammer icon to confirm Glean tools are available.

5

Verify

Per host, ask "Who's on call for payments-service?" and confirm a real, Glean-cited answer.

Take it further
  • Ask an onboarding question ("explain how payments-service handles retries") right after cloning a repo — no context-switching to search separately.
  • Compare tool selection across hosts for the same prompt — each host's MCP client decides which Glean tools to call, and they don't always agree.
  • Ask an incident-investigation question ("what changed in payments-service recently?") to see multi-tool chaining (search + code) in one turn.
Try it

What does our team own?

The MCP host's chat returns an answer grounded in your Glean content, with citations, proving the server is connected and authenticated.

Summarize our most recent incident review

The host returns a cited summary grounded in your own content — not a fabricated one. If it answers without citations, the MCP server is not actually being consulted.

Each of these was run against a live Glean instance on 2026-08-02.

  • Choose your tool
    Install the plugin
    1
    claude plugin marketplace add gleanwork/glean-cookbook
    2
    claude plugin install cookbook@glean-cookbook
    Run the recipe
    /cookbook:connect-mcp-hosts

    Run /reload-plugins to pick it up without restarting.

Runs the recipe through the Glean cookbook plugin.

At a glance
SurfacesMCP
StatusProduction pattern
Time~15 min
Required scopes
MCP