Show HN: Director – Local first, open source MCP Gateway

[bwm]

Hey HN. we’re Barnaby and Tom from Director (https://director.run). A fully open source, local first MCP gateway that allows you to connect Claude, Cursor or VSCode to any MCP server in 30 seconds.

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj4mGLp-aSk

Website: https://director.run

Repository: https://github.com/director-run/director

MCP is a promising technology, but it's still early and there are lot's of (well known) problems:

- Configuration: Hard to setup, requiring writing JSON for each new client <> server connection.

- Observability: No easy way to inspect (and modify) traffic flowing between clients and servers.

- Security: MCP is often vulnerable to remote code execution attacks and prompt injection attacks.

- Context Window Management: It's very easy to load too many tools into the context window at which point the LLM can get confused.

We're looking to solve these problems by building director. We're starting with a simple local experience, but intend to add features like oAuth very soon that will allow you to run this in the cloud (or in a secure container).

Looking forward to hearing any feedback or ideas you have!

[dmmalam]

Looks super useful, will deploy. I've found context window management the killer limiter / skill in enabling many agents flows. Difference between it being magic, and not working. Looking forward to any solutions here.

[bwm]

Yup, this is exactly the problem we're solving with Director :)

[nc]

Just tried it out. Easiest way to use MCP. Nice work!

[bwm]

Thank you! Feel free to let me know if you need help getting it working!

[shubhamintech]

how do you view analytics/insights on the mcp server?