INDI Server

An MCP server that controls astrophotography equipment via INDI on a Raspberry Pi (or equivalent device), and exposes it to other computers on the local network.

What it does

• Equipment control — connect to an INDI server and control mounts, cameras, filter wheels, focusers and other astrophotography gear through MCP tools.
• INDI server management — manage the INDI server itself: install/remove drivers, and start, stop or restart the server, all via MCP.
• Frame storage — captured frames are stored on the Raspberry Pi and can be listed, inspected and transferred to another computer on the local network via MCP.

Documentation

• Design Document
• Deployment — running the server locally (stdio) vs. as a systemd service on the Raspberry Pi (streamable-http)

Debug CLI

indi-mcp-cli is a small standalone tool for manually testing/debugging the INDI server and driver management tools, without needing an MCP client:

uv run indi-mcp-cli server status
uv run indi-mcp-cli server start --port 7624
uv run indi-mcp-cli driver list
uv run indi-mcp-cli driver start "CCD Simulator"
uv run indi-mcp-cli listen --device "CCD Simulator"   # prints incoming events until Ctrl+C

The driver subcommands read the driver catalog from /usr/share/indi/ by default, which only exists where INDI's drivers are actually installed (e.g. the Raspberry Pi). On a machine with a local INDI install elsewhere (e.g. Homebrew on macOS, typically /usr/local/share/indi), point indiweb at it via the INDI_DATA_DIR env var:

export INDI_DATA_DIR=/usr/local/share/indi
uv run indi-mcp-cli driver list

Status

Early setup stage — MCP server skeleton in place, with INDI server management tools (start/stop/restart/status) implemented.

Tech stack

• Python 3.12+, managed with uv
• Official Python MCP SDK (mcp)
• indipyclient — pure-Python INDI client, used for equipment control
• indiweb — used as a library only (its IndiServer/DriverCollection classes), for indiserver process/FIFO control and driver-catalog parsing; its bundled web app is not used
• Ruff for linting and formatting
• ty for static type checking
• pytest, with pytest-asyncio and pytest-cov
• pre-commit to run the above on every commit

Development setup

uv sync --dev
uv run pre-commit install

Common tasks:

uv run ruff check .          # lint
uv run ruff format .         # format
uv run ty check .            # type-check
uv run pytest --cov          # test

Contributing / branching model

This project follows a git-flow-style workflow:

• main — always releasable; only accepts merges from release/* or hotfix/* branches.
• develop — integration branch for ongoing work.
• feature/* — branched from and merged back into develop.

A CI check (enforce-merge-policy) rejects pull requests that don't follow these rules.