mcpplex

A terminal UI for viewing and exploring MCP (Model Context Protocol) server logs.

Built with Textual.

Note: This tool has been developed and tested primarily with Claude Desktop logs. It may work with other MCP clients, but this has not been verified.

Screenshots

Features

• Log parsing — auto-detects timestamps, server names, log levels, and JSON-RPC messages
• Request/response pairing — matches client requests with server responses by message ID, scoped per session
• JSON payload inspection — pretty-printed detail view for structured payloads, including truncated JSON recovery
• Search — filter log entries in real time with /
• Live tail — follow a log file for new entries (-f), similar to tail -f
• Color-coded connectors — each MCP server gets a distinct color via golden-ratio hue spacing
• Sortable time column — click the Time header to toggle ascending/descending

Install

pipx install mcpplex

Or with pip:

pip install mcpplex

Usage

# View a log file
mcpplex mcp.log

# Follow a log file for live updates
mcpplex -f mcp.log

# Pipe from stdin
cat mcp.log | mcpplex

Keybindings

Key	Action
/	Open search bar
Enter	Show detail view
f	Toggle follow mode
Escape	Close search / clear
q	Quit

Contributing

git clone https://github.com/shuaibird/mcpplex
cd mcpplex
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest