Today, we are announcing that Symfony teamed up with The PHP Foundation, and Anthropic's MCP team to launch the official MCP SDK. Our goal is a framework-agnostic, production-ready library the entire PHP ecosystem can rely on.

The Symfony team will lead maintenance, with contributions from the broader community, including Kyrian Obikwelu (PHP-MCP).

Model Context Protocol

Less than a year ago, Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open protocol to standardize how LLM-powered client applications interact with context-providing servers. The specification is designed around common capabilities that are used when building agents and complex workflows, like Prompts, Tools, Resources, and more.

The specification is designed around common capabilities, used when building agents and complex workflow — such as Prompts, Tools, and Resources — and has already seen broad adoption across the software industry. Published under the MIT license, MCP first shipped with SDKs in Python and TypeScript, sparking hundreds of open-source clients, servers, and SDKs in more languages.

Symfony joining forces for the official MCP SDK

When we kicked off the Symfony AI initiative, a low-level MCP SDK was already part of it. It was rather a first draft - not yet feature complete - and meant to evolve as part of the initiative. In parallel, the PHP-MCP project maintained multiple MCP-related packages as well.

Now, thanks to an initiative led by The PHP Foundation in collaboration with Anthropic's MCP team, Symfony and PHP-MCP are joining forces to provide the official PHP MCP SDK.

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$ composer require mcp/sdk

Still work in progress

The repository and package are now public, but we have not yet tagged a stable release. As with the Symfony AI initiative, we're inviting the community to help shape the SDK together.

How to Get Started

Closing Notes

We would like to thank David Soria Parra (Anthropic) and Roman Pronskiy (PHP Foundation) for their initiative, and Kyrian Obikwelu, of PHP-MCP, for heading into this endeavor with us.

As part of this transition, the current symfony/ai MCP SDK package will be deprecated and removed.

Published in #Community