MCP server for working in a git repository: local git in-process, and GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, and Forgejo behind one small set of tools.

The existing forge MCP servers expose the API, not a workflow. Counted from their own sources: GitHub's has ~125 tools, GitLab's ~88, Gitea's ~54. One tool per endpoint, three servers, three vocabularies, and an agent that has to work out which one it is talking to.

Skipper registers 15, and shows fewer than that: only the ones this repository can actually use.

An agent does not need to be emperor of your forge. It does not need to create or destroy an organization on any given turn. It needs to know what this repository is, whether the build passed, and what broke. Skipper exposes that and skips the rest.

No skipper tool can write to a forge. There is no create, delete, merge, close, or fork. The only state any tool changes is local: staging, committing, and local branches. There is no push, fetch, or pull, so an agent cannot move a commit to a remote through skipper at all.

The destructive operations still exist in the CLIs. To delete a release, an agent calls gh directly, which your harness can allow or deny with one rule. That is one binary to gate instead of 267 tools to audit.

Local git needs no credentials: it reads and writes the repository directly, never the network.

For forges, skipper reuses the credentials the CLIs already hold. It stores no tokens of its own. Log in as usual:

gh auth login
glab auth login
tea login add

For Gitea and Forgejo, skipper reads the token from tea's config instead of running tea, which can block on an interactive prompt that never resolves under a non-interactive server. tea login add is still how you set it up.

Building from source requires Rust 1.98 or newer. The repository pins Rust 1.98.1 for local and release builds.

Local git needs no binary: it runs in-process on gitoxide.

A missing, outdated, or unauthenticated CLI just hides that provider's tools. An auth check that fails on the network (timeout, connection reset) is not treated as logged out: skipper retries it with backoff for a few minutes and announces the tools with tools/list_changed once it answers. Detection results are logged to stderr, which MCP clients keep in their server logs.

Tools follow the repository, not the toolbox. A forge's tools appear only when all of the following hold:

1. the workspace is a git repository,
2. one of its remotes points at that forge, and
3. the forge's CLI is installed, new enough, and authenticated.

Git tools need only a repository; they do not depend on any CLI.

So an installed gh does not put GitHub tools in front of a checkout hosted on Forgejo. github.com, gitlab.com, and codeberg.org are recognized out of the box; self-hosted instances are mapped in config:

# ~/.config/skipper/config.toml (global) or ./skipper.toml (per repo)
[hosts]
"github.enterprise.com" = "github"
"gitlab.internal"       = "gitlab"
"192.168.3.20"          = "forgejo"

Forge names accept aliases: github/gh, gitlab/glab, and gitea/forgejo/tea (Gitea and Forgejo are both driven by tea). Remotes whose host isn't mapped simply expose no forge tools. The unmapped hosts are logged at startup so you know what to add.

Visibility is re-evaluated while the server runs. A background watcher polls the workspace's remotes, so git init, git remote add, re-pointing a remote, or removing one updates the tool set within a few seconds and emits notifications/tools/list_changed. No restart needed.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/seuros/skipper/master/scripts/install.sh | bash

It picks the latest release and the right build for your machine, and installs to ~/.local/bin. Pass --prefix for somewhere else or --version for a specific tag. Prebuilt for Linux and macOS, x86_64 and arm64.

Or build it yourself:

cargo install skipper

Either way you get the skipper-mcp binary. Skipper is a server, not a library: the Rust API exists so the binary and the tests can share code, and it is not a supported interface. Depend on the MCP tools and resources, not on skipper::*.

Skipper speaks MCP over stdio. Add it to your client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skipper": { "command": "skipper-mcp" }
  }
}

Questions about this repository are resources, not tools, and they are scoped by the workspace's remotes rather than your account.

Claude Code never lists MCP resources to its model, so for claude-code clients skipper appends the resources visible to that session to its server instructions. Other clients get the plain instructions.

build_watch blocks until the run's status changes or wait_secs elapses (default 60), then returns the status with a terminal flag. Call it again while terminal is false. It polls; it does not rely on the client surfacing server notifications.

pr_build_wait blocks until every check on a PR concludes, or until the first failure with fail_fast (the default), and returns the overall conclusion, per-bucket counts, and the failing checks with links. It declares optional MCP task support. On timeout_secs (default 30 min) it returns the pending snapshot rather than an error.

The skipper://pr/{number}/checks resource template returns the check matrix for any PR (checks grouped by workflow with bucket, timing, and links), and skipper://pr/current/checks resolves the current branch's PR.

pr_watch keeps one watch per server. The first call blocks until something happens on any watched PR (up to wait_secs), then returns the events. A pr_watch call made while another one blocks only adds its PR and returns at once; the blocking call reports that PR's events too. Merged, closed, and unreadable PRs always wake the call and leave the watch; until picks which of comment, review, checks, and push also do. Read skipper://watch for the current state without blocking or consuming events.

It is built not to hammer the API. Every read carries the last ETag, so an unchanged PR costs a free 304; comments and reviews are fetched only after the PR itself changed. Each PR polls every 10s, backing off to 2 minutes while quiet (5 when no call waits) and back to 10s on any change; running checks cap it at 30s. Retry-After and a low X-RateLimit-Remaining stretch it further, and a process-wide token bucket caps the request rate. A watch with no calls or resource reads for 30 minutes stops.

Optional: skipper.toml in the repo root or ~/.config/skipper/config.toml (local overrides global). See skipper.example.toml.

cargo test                       # unit + detection tests (no auth needed)
SKIPPER_LIVE_TESTS=1 cargo test  # live forge commands via your CLIs

Contributions are welcome for tools that come up in real workflows. The bar is one question: did you need this while actually working, or does it just exist in the API? "Check whether my PR is green" passes. "Transfer repository ownership" does not.

A few things that help a proposal land:

• say which workflow it serves, and how often you hit it
• prefer read-only; if it writes, explain why the CLI isn't good enough
• prefer one tool that answers a question over three that expose endpoints
• scope it to the current repository where that makes sense; skipper's tools follow the workspace's remotes, not your whole account

Creating an organization is banned until the heat death of the universe. Fifteen-plus years of GitHub and that has never once needed to be done programmatically, let alone by an agent mid-task. The same goes for deleting organizations, transferring ownership, and managing billing. If you genuinely need those, the CLIs still have them, and that is exactly the point: they live behind one binary your harness can deny, instead of inside a tool surface you have to audit.