andybrandt/mcp-simple-openai-assistant

*AI assistants are pretty cool. I thought it would be a good idea if my Claude (conscious Claude) would also have one. And now he has - and its both useful anf fun for him. Your Claude can have one too!*
A simple MCP server for interacting with OpenAI assistants. This server allows other tools (like Claude Desktop) to create and interact with OpenAI assistants through the Model Context Protocol.
Features
This server provides a suite of tools to manage and interact with OpenAI Assistants. The new streaming capabilities provide a much-improved, real-time user experience.
Available Tools
- **create_assistant**: (Create OpenAI Assistant) - Create a new assistant with a name, instructions, and model.
- **list_assistants**: (List OpenAI Assistants) - List all available assistants associated with your API key.
- **retrieve_assistant**: (Retrieve OpenAI Assistant) - Get detailed information about a specific assistant.
- **update_assistant**: (Update OpenAI Assistant) - Modify an existing assistant's name, instructions, or model.
- **create_new_assistant_thread**: (Create New Assistant Thread) - Creates a new, persistent conversation thread with a user-defined name and description for easy identification and reuse. This is the recommended way to start a new conversation.
- **list_threads**: (List Managed Threads) - Lists all locally managed conversation threads from the database, showing their ID, name, description, and last used time.
- **delete_thread**: (Delete Managed Thread) - Deletes a conversation thread from both OpenAI's servers and the local database.
- **ask_assistant_in_thread**: (Ask Assistant in Thread and Stream Response) - The primary tool for conversation. Sends a message to an assistant within a thread and streams the response back in real-time.
Because OpenAI assistants might take quite long to respond, this server uses a streaming approach for the main ask_assistant_in_thread tool. This provides real-time progress updates to the client and avoids timeouts.
The server now includes local persistence for threads, which is a significant improvement. Since the OpenAI API does not allow listing threads, this server now manages them for you by storing their IDs and metadata in a local SQLite database. This allows you to easily find, reuse, and manage your conversation threads across sessions.
Installation
Installing via Smithery
To install MCP Simple OpenAI Assistant for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:
Manual Installation
Configuration
The server requires an OpenAI API key to be set in the environment. For Claude Desktop, add this to your config:
(MacOS version)
(Windows version)
*MS Windows installation is slightly more complex, because you need to check the actual path to your Python executable. Path provided above is usually correct, but might differ in your setup. Sometimes just python.exe without any path will do the trick. Check with cmd what works for you (using where python might help). Also, on Windows you might need to explicitly tell Claude Desktop where the site packages are using PYTHONPATH environmment variable.*