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

Discussion
1

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!

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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.

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3

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.

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5

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…

6

That’s fantastic, thanks for the reply