Submitting MCP Tools

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.clawup.org/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Read this online: docs.clawup.org/src/mcp-submissions

The Tool Marketplace in ClawUp lets any user submit a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for review. Once the admin approves it, it appears in every user’s marketplace and can be bound to any Claw with one click.

Need a review? Ping the admin on the @clawup Telegram channel after you submit — that’s the fastest way to get eyes on a pending entry.

This guide walks you through submitting a tool, what happens during review, and how to handle a rejection.

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Why MCP?

The Model Context Protocol solves a wiring problem that’s otherwise N×M painful: N tools you want your agent to use, M LLM providers and runtimes that each speak their own tool-calling dialect. Before MCP, every (tool, provider) combo needed a bespoke adapter — a Slack tool that worked in OpenAI’s function-calling format had to be re-implemented for Anthropic’s tool-use format, and again for any in-house runtime. That cost compounded fast and froze most agent platforms into one-provider silos. MCP defines a small, transport-agnostic JSON-RPC-style contract: a tool exposes its capabilities (tools/list), accepts calls (tools/call), and optionally streams events. The model side implements the client once and can talk to any MCP server. Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and the open-source agent runtimes have all converged on this contract. For ClawUp specifically, the protocol is load-bearing in three ways:

1. Provider freedom. A user can switch their Claw from claude-sonnet-4-6 to gpt-5.4 without re-binding any tools — the MCP layer is what the runtime calls into, not the model. This is why the Tool Marketplace lists tools with no per-provider variants.
2. Runtime portability. OpenClaw and Hermes are different runtimes with different internal architectures, but both speak MCP. A tool submitted to the marketplace is usable by every Claw on every runtime, today and as new runtimes are added.
3. Network effects in the marketplace. Tools are external HTTPS services — a submitter doesn’t ship code into the runtime image, doesn’t need ClawUp to deploy anything, doesn’t need to wait for a release. They post a server.json, get reviewed once, and every user on the platform can bind it instantly. One person’s Firecrawl integration becomes everyone’s. Without MCP that hand-off would require a code change in ClawUp itself.

That’s the lever the Tool Marketplace pulls — the rest of this page is the mechanics of how a submission gets there.

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Who can submit?

Any signed-in ClawUp user. The admin only steps in at the review stage — to nudge them after you submit, message the @clawup Telegram channel. You can have at most 5 pending submissions at a time. After one is approved or rejected, you can submit again. There’s no cap on lifetime submissions.

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Before you submit

You’ll need:

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Submit a tool from the dashboard

1. In the left sidebar, click Tool Marketplace.
2. Click the Submit MCP button in the top-right.
3. Fill in the form:
   • Name — short, unique, user-facing (e.g. Firecrawl Search).
   • Description — what the tool does.
   • Endpoint URL — the public HTTPS URL.
   • Transport — http or sse.
   • Auth — none or api_key.
   • Category, Capability hint, Icon URL, Homepage — optional but recommended; they show up on the tool card.
   • Visibility — public (default) makes the tool available to every user once approved. private keeps it to you: only you can see and bind it to your Claws.
4. Click Submit.

You’ll see your submission immediately under the My submissions tab with status pending.

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Importing from the MCP registry

If your tool is already published in a registry like ac.inference.sh, expand Import from the MCP registry at the top of the form, paste the registry name (e.g. ac.inference.sh/mcp) or a server.json blob, and click Import & fill to populate the fields automatically.

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What happens during review

While your submission is pending:

• It appears in your My submissions tab.
• It appears in your own /api/v1/tools list with owned_by_viewer = true so you can bind it to your own Claws as a draft, even before it’s approved publicly.
• It does not appear in any other user’s marketplace.
• The admin sees it in the review queue. Ping @clawup on Telegram if you’d like them to look sooner.

The admin runs an automated probe against your endpoint and decides:

• Approve — your submission moves to approved. If you set visibility to public, it now shows up in every user’s Tool Marketplace. Approved entries become read-only for the submitter; you can no longer edit or withdraw them.
• Reject — admin attaches notes explaining why (e.g. “endpoint missing handshake field”). You’ll see status rejected along with the notes under My submissions.

There’s no SLA on review — typically a few hours to a day depending on the queue.

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Handling a rejection

You can edit a rejected submission and resubmit it. Editing flips the status back to pending and clears the previous reviewer notes:

1. Open My submissions, find the rejected entry.
2. Click Edit.
3. Address the reviewer’s notes (often: fix the endpoint URL, add an auth scheme, or expose the missing handshake).
4. Click Save.

The same row is re-queued for the admin — no need to start over. You can also withdraw a pending or rejected submission entirely by clicking Delete.

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Binding an approved tool to a Claw

Once your submission is approved (or while it’s still pending and owned by you):

1. Open any Claw and go to Tools.
2. Find the tool by name, click Install.
3. If the tool’s auth scheme is api_key, paste the key when prompted. ClawUp stores it encrypted alongside the binding and injects it at runtime.

The tool is now wired into the Claw’s MCP runtime. The Claw can call any of the tool’s functions on its next turn.

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Common errors

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See also

• Claw Connect — the agent-to-agent communication MCP that ships with every ClawUp runtime.
• Teams — how multiple Claws coordinate using MCP tools.