HomeMCPArcade with Claude Desktop

Connect Claude Desktop to Arcade

In this guide, you’ll learn how to connect Claude Desktop to a local Arcade server.

Prerequisites

  1. Create an Arcade account
  2. Get an Arcade API key
  3. Install Python 3.10 or higher
    Verify your Python version by running python --version or python3 --version in your terminal.

Install Dependencies

pip install arcade-ai
pip install arcade-google

See Arcade’s Integrations for more toolkits that can be installed.

Set up Claude Desktop

  1. Download and open Claude Desktop
  2. Claude Menu —> “Settings” —> “Developer” —> “Edit Config”
  3. This will create a configuration file at:
    • On Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
    • On Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
  4. Open the configuration file and replace the file contents with this:

Replace YOUR_ARCADE_API_KEY_HERE with your actual Arcade API key and /path/to/python with the path to your Python interpreter and /path/to/arcade with the path to the Arcade package.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arcade-stdio": {
      "command": "bash",
      "args": [
        "-c",
        "export ARCADE_API_KEY=YOUR_ARCADE_API_KEY_HERE && /path/to/python /path/to/arcade serve --mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}
  1. Restart Claude Desktop. Upon restarting, you should have access to the Arcade toolkits you installed.
Direct Third-Party API CallUsing Arcade tools