Claude Academy
Loading

Project setup

Lesson 517 min

We're going to build a CLI-based chatbot that demonstrates how MCP clients and servers work together. This hands-on project will give you practical experience with both sides of the MCP architecture.

What We're Building

Our chatbot will allow users to interact with a collection of documents through natural language. The system consists of two main components:

  • An MCP client that handles user interactions and communicates with Claude
  • An MCP server that provides tools for reading and updating documents

The server will expose two tools to Claude:

  • Tool to read a document's contents
  • Tool to update a document's contents

All documents are stored in memory for simplicity - they include files like document.pdf, spreadsheet.xlsx, report.txt, and spec.md.

Important Architecture Note

In real-world projects, you typically implement either an MCP client or an MCP server, not both. You might build:

  • Just an MCP server to expose your service's capabilities to AI models
  • Just an MCP client to connect to existing MCP servers built by other developers

We're building both components in this project purely for educational purposes - to understand how they communicate and work together.

Project Setup

Download cli_project.zip from the Downloads section at the end of this lesson and extract it to your preferred development directory. Open your code editor in the project folder.

Configuration

The project includes a README.md file with detailed setup instructions. You'll need to:

  1. Add your Anthropic API key to the .env file
  2. Install dependencies using either UV (recommended) or pip

The .env file should contain:

bash
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-api-key-here"

Running the Project

Once setup is complete, navigate to your project directory in the terminal and run:

bash
# If using UV (recommended)
uv run main.py

# If using standard Python
python main.py

You should see a chat prompt appear. Test it by asking a simple question like "what's 1+1?" to verify everything is working correctly.

The starter project already includes basic chat functionality with Claude. In the following videos, we'll add MCP server capabilities and document management features to create a fully functional document-aware chatbot.

Downloads

  • Starter project (cli_project.zip)

    The chatbot project you build on for the rest of this section.

    Download

  • Completed project (cli_project_COMPLETE.zip)

    The finished version, for checking your work.

    Download