Introduction

0:00 I've seen a lot of tutorials covering just that. This is really developer first tutorial. So, you're going to learn how you can set up your own MCP servers using the Python SDK, but then also integrate those servers into your own Python application and back end so you can start to build AI systems and agents around it. And now, if you're new to the channel, my name is Dave Ablar. I'm the founder of Data Luminina. We've been building custom data and AI solutions for our clients for the past six years already.

0:22 So, even before Chat GBT, I have a bachelor's and a master's degree in artificial intelligence. And my goal with these videos is always to really help you to cut through the noise and focus on what you can actually use to build production ready AI systems and agents. So let's dive in. All right. So throughout this tutorial, I will be walking you through this GitHub repository. Link will be in the description. It's the MCP crash course which is part of my AI cookbook where I dump all of the tutorials for all of the videos that I create here on this channel.

1:10 So let's quickly cover what we will go through in this video. And we're going to start with some theory first. So I will outline uh timestamps below this video. So if you want to dive straight into the code, you feel free to jump to that, but I don't recommend doing that if you're new to MC MCP because you really need to first understand what it is because otherwise a lot of things won't make any sense. So I will walk you through seven chap chapters.

1:33 Chapter one, chapter two is really about understanding what MCP is and then we're going to set up the servers. We do an open AAI integration. We'll look at MCP versus function calling. Uh we'll show you how you can set up your server and run it in Docker so you can actually start to put this into applications and then finally we'll talk about life cycle management to properly handle all the connections of your applications. Now if you want to follow along feel free to clone this repository, set up your dev environment, install the requirements should be straightforward and then all of the underlying code examples that I will walk you through are in the folders over here.

1:56 All right, and with that out of the way let's dive straight into part one introduction and context. So, for those of you that are completely new to MCP, it stands for model context protocol. And over the past weeks and