Help me out - step by step setting up Neon (postgres) MCP

Let’s be honest, nothing is at all clear on the either the Cursor docs or the Neon MCP server docs.

Those who ‘get it’, please can you provide a step-by-step guide to setting up the Neon MCP with cursor, please?

So far, I’ve run the command, got a config.json and added that to the MCP list - with a ‘no tools’ error warning.

Does this require Claude Desktop? Again, nothing is clear in either docs!

Just had to figure this out myself.

Here’s how I got it to work:

  • Open up cursor terminal and run npx -y @smithery/cli install neon --client claude
  • It will ask you for your neon API key, you can get this in your neon account settings
  • Then run npm list -g @neondatabase/mcp-server-neon in the terminal to get the location of the mcp server. You should get something like:
/opt/homebrew/lib
└── @neondatabase/[email protected]
  • Then go to Cursor’s Features tab and add the neon server. For type select “command” and for the command use node /opt/homebrew/lib/node_modules/@neondatabase/mcp-server-neon/dist/index.js start [your_api_key]

Hope that helps.

Note: for some reason the cursor agent gets stuck when using “list_projects” tool when it doesn’t have a query to search (i.e. if you ask it to list all projects). It works perfectly fine if you tell it the name of the project.

2 Likes

Hi, I work at Neon. We’re looking at the issue with list projects. Everything else seems to work, though.

A slightly easier setup is:

  1. Open Cursor and go to Cursor Settings.
  2. On the Features tab, find the MCP Servers section and click + Add new MCP server.
  3. Enter the following details:
  • Name: Neon MCP or whatever you want to name it
  • Type: Change from sse to command and enter:

npx -y @neondatabase/mcp-server-neon start <neon_api_key>

Once the server is connected, you should see a green active status.

2 Likes

May you please review my comments in thread:

and provide clarity on my info being correct or not…

And I really need to delve into what you are doing, as I;ve taken a brake from @cursor for a couple mements due to evaluating it/me…

That’s fantastic, thanks for the reply