// MCP Server Starter Kit

Production-grade starting points for developers building with AI.

Name: MCP Server Starter Kit
Brand: Plinth
Price: 39 USD
Availability: InStock

Two battle-tested MCP server templates — Python and TypeScript — with the boring, load-bearing stuff already done: auth, rate limiting, retries, structured logging, graceful shutdown and hardened Docker. Skip the week of yak-shaving and ship.

Get the kit — $39 See what's inside

● 23 Python + 19 TypeScript tests passing, driven over the real MCP protocol.

~/my-mcp-server — pytest

# clone the template, install, run the suite
$ make test
# python template
tests/test_auth.py ......        [ ok ]
tests/test_ratelimit.py ....     [ ok ]
tests/test_protocol.py ........  [ ok ]
tests/test_shutdown.py ...       [ ok ]
23 passed
# typescript template
19 passed  →  42 passed over the real MCP protocol
# logs go to stderr, never stdout — protocol stays clean
stderr {"level":"info","msg":"server ready","transport":"stdio"}

// what's inside

Everything an MCP server needs in production — already wired up.

Not a hello-world. Two real templates plus working example servers, with the SRE hygiene you'd otherwise bolt on at 2am after the first incident.

[ template ]

Python template

Typed, packaged, tested. stdio and HTTP transports, clean project layout, make targets for dev, lint and test.

[ template ]

TypeScript template

Strict TS, ESM, the official SDK. Same architecture as the Python kit so you can switch stacks without relearning.

[ examples ]

Example servers

Runnable example MCP servers showing tools, resources and prompts wired correctly — copy, rename, ship.

[ security ]

Auth gate

Token/API-key gating in front of your tools so a misconfigured client can't call privileged actions.

[ resilience ]

Rate limiting

Per-client throttling out of the box. Greedy agents don't get to melt your downstream APIs.

[ resilience ]

Retries with backoff

Exponential backoff with jitter on outbound calls. Transient failures recover instead of cascading.

[ observability ]

Structured logging to stderr

JSON logs on stderr — the one place that won't corrupt the stdio protocol framing. The gotcha that bites everyone, handled.

[ lifecycle ]

Graceful shutdown

Signal handlers drain in-flight work and close transports cleanly so deploys don't truncate responses.

[ safety ]

Input validation

Schema-validated tool arguments. Bad input is rejected at the boundary, not deep in your handler.

[ ops ]

Health checks

Liveness/readiness endpoints so your orchestrator actually knows when the server is up.

[ deploy ]

Hardened Dockerfiles

Multi-stage, non-root, slim images for both stacks. Build, run, deploy to any VPS or platform.

[ confidence ]

Real protocol tests

42 tests that drive the server over the actual MCP protocol — not mocked internals. Change code, run make test, know it works.

// why it exists

The MCP quickstart gets you to "it runs." Then production happens.

The protocol is young and the examples online are toys. The moment you put an MCP server in front of a real agent and a real API, the same problems show up — and every one of them is a foot-gun the docs gloss over.

Plinth is the base you'd build for yourself if you had a free week and had already been burned once. It's already been burned for you.

Get the kit — $39

✗ Logs to stdout silently break the protocol. One stray print() corrupts the stdio JSON-RPC stream and the client just… disconnects. The fix: everything to stderr — done for you.
✗ No rate limiting. An agent in a loop hammers your downstream API and you eat the bill or the ban. The kit throttles per-client by default.
✗ No retries. A single transient 503 fails the whole tool call. The kit wraps outbound calls in backoff with jitter.
✗ No auth. Any client that can reach the transport can call any tool. The kit gates calls behind a token before they hit your handlers.
✓ So you start from the solid base. Clone, rename, add your tools. The hard 20% is already there and tested.

23 Python + 19 TypeScript tests passing

— driven over the real MCP protocol, not mocked internals. You inherit the test suite, so you know your changes still work.

// FREE & OPEN SOURCE

See the patterns in the wild.

Free, MIT-licensed MCP servers we ship using the exact hygiene that's in the kit. Clone one, read the code, run it. Then build yours on the same base.

Stop rebuilding the base. Start on it.

Two production-ready MCP server templates, example servers, and the SRE hygiene baked in. One payment, yours forever.

$39 / one-time

Get the MCP Server Starter Kit

Instant download via Gumroad · Python + TypeScript included