🧳 MCP Travel Desk — A Minimal MCP Client & Server Demo

This is a simple demonstration of building an MCP server and using Claude Desktop as a client. It simply shows a Travel Desk system to handle employee travel requests, approvals, and history tracking — all accessible directly from Claude.

🚀 Setup Instructions

1. Install Claude Desktop

Download and install Claude Desktop from Anthropic. This acts as your MCP client.

2. Install MCP Python SDK

pip install mcp

3. Install uv (Python Package Manager)

pip install uv

On macOS, if this fails:

brew install uv

4. Initialize MCP Server

uv init

5. Create main.py

append the main.py code in the repo

6. Install the Server into Claude

uv run mcp install main.py

This will:

Create a virtual environment (.venv) Add your server to Claude config Output logs like:

Added server 'TravelDesk' to Claude config
Successfully installed TravelDesk in Claude app

7. macOS Troubleshooting

If the server doesn't start in Claude: Run:

brew install uv

Restart Claude Desktop Go to Claude → Developer Settings and ensure the server is Running

8. Use Claude as MCP Client

Claude reads the MCP config from .mcp/claude.json.

9. Tools Appear in Claude UI

Once installed, the following tools will be available inside Claude:

submit_travel_request get_travel_history approved_trips_count greeting://{name}

10. Ask Queries via Claude

Try asking: Submit a travel request for E001 to Paris from 2025-01-01 to 2025-01-05 How many approved trips does E002 have? Get travel history for E001 greeting://Chaitanya