Troubleshooting Your Claude MCP Configuration

These days I add MCP support for pretty much every software product I build, including most recently IterOps and SecurityBot.dev. Creating the MCP server is very easy because I build all of my SaaS products using Laravel, and Laravel offers native MCP support.

What's less clear is how to configure the MCP client to talk to the MCP server. This is because many MCP servers use npx mcp-remote to call the MCP server URL. This is easy enough, however if you're running NVM to assist with handling Node version discrepancies across multiple projects, then you might need to explicitly define the npx path inside the claude_desktop_config.json file, like this:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "contributoriq": {
      "command": "/Users/wjgilmore/.nvm/versions/node/v22.17.1/bin/npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://contributoriq.test/mcp",
        "--header",
        "Authorization: Bearer 1|my-bearer-token-goes-here"
      ]
    },
  },
  "isUsingBuiltInNodeForMcp": false,
  "preferences": {
    "localAgentModeTrustedFolders": [
      "/Users/wjgilmore/Documents/wjgilmore/finances/2025/2025 taxes/claude"
    ],
    "coworkScheduledTasksEnabled": true,
    "ccdScheduledTasksEnabled": true,
    "sidebarMode": "chat",
    "coworkWebSearchEnabled": true
  }
}

If you're using Laravel Herd and the MCP client is crashing once Claude loads, it might be because you're using Herd's locally generated SSL certificates. The mcp-remote package doesn't like this and will complain about the certificate not being signed. You can tell mcp-remote to ignore this by adding the NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED environment variable:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "contributoriq": {
      "command": "/Users/wjgilmore/.nvm/versions/node/v22.17.1/bin/npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://contributoriq.test/mcp",
        "--header",
        "Authorization: Bearer 1|my-bearer-token-goes-here"
      ],
      "env": {
        "NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED": "0"
      }
    },
  },
  "isUsingBuiltInNodeForMcp": false,
  "preferences": {
    "localAgentModeTrustedFolders": [
    ],
    "coworkScheduledTasksEnabled": true,
    "ccdScheduledTasksEnabled": true,
    "sidebarMode": "chat",
    "coworkWebSearchEnabled": true
  }
}