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Troubleshooting

Due to the emerging nature of the MCP Specification and differences in how various LLM providers and client applications implement it, you may encounter issues when hosting and using MCP servers with Gram. This troubleshooting guide addresses common problems and provides solutions to help you resolve them quickly.

Helpful resources

Section titled “Helpful resources”

The following external resources provide additional context and information about MCP, and may be helpful when troubleshooting issues:

Issues with MCP remote and Node.js environments

Section titled “Issues with MCP remote and Node.js environments”

Some LLM clients, such as Claude, are not yet able to connect to remote MCP servers natively. To overcome this, you can use the mcp-remote CLI tool to proxy requests from an LLM client to hosted MCP servers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "remote-example": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://remote.mcp.server/sse"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Since version 0.1.26 of the mcp-remote package, some users have reported servers failing to start, with Client transport closed appearing in client logs.

This is typically due to the LLM client attempting to use an older version of Node.js than required to execute mcp-remote.

Solutions

Section titled “Solutions”
Section titled “Use Node.js 20 or higher (recommended)”

Ensure that you’re using Node.js version 20 or higher. If you run into issues, check the Claude Desktop logs to see which Node.js version it is selecting. Claude Desktop has at times shown a tendency to select the lowest version of Node.js it can find on your machine, regardless of the default Node.js version. Instructions for installing and managing Node.js versions can be found on the official Node.js website.

Pin mcp-remote to version 0.1.25

Section titled “Pin mcp-remote to version 0.1.25”

If you’re unable to install or change to a compatible version of Node.js, you can pin the mcp-remote package to version 0.1.25 in your MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "remote-example": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote@0.1.25",
        "https://remote.mcp.server/sse"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Getting support

Section titled “Getting support”

If you’re encountering a persistent issue that isn’t covered in this troubleshooting guide, please reach out to Gram support via the in-app chat, or join our Slack community to get help!