Claude Code

This guide connects Claude Code — Anthropic's agentic coding tool — to American Cloud. Claude Code is the most powerful pairing for the MCP server: it can manage your infrastructure and run commands in your terminal, so it can provision a server and deploy to it in the same session.

Prerequisites

• Claude Code installed
• Node.js 20 or newer
• An American Cloud API key from console.americancloud.com/api-keys — start with a read-only key

Configure

Add the server with one command:

claude mcp add americancloud \
  --env AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_ID=your-client-id \
  --env AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_SECRET=your-client-secret \
  -- npx -y @americancloud/mcp

By default this configures the server for the current project only. To make it available in every project, add --scope user:

claude mcp add americancloud --scope user \
  --env AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_ID=your-client-id \
  --env AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_SECRET=your-client-secret \
  -- npx -y @americancloud/mcp

Verify

Inside a Claude Code session, run /mcp to see the server's connection status and tools, or just ask:

What regions can I deploy to on American Cloud?

Sharing with your team

To check the server into a repository so teammates get it automatically, use --scope project, which writes a .mcp.json file at the project root. Reference environment variables instead of hardcoding secrets:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "americancloud": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@americancloud/mcp"],
      "env": {
        "AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_ID": "${AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_ID}",
        "AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_SECRET": "${AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_SECRET}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Each teammate sets the two variables in their own shell environment, with their own key.

Enable resource management (optional)

By default the server is read-only. To let Claude Code create and manage resources, use a read-write API key and add --allow-writes after the package name:

claude mcp add americancloud \
  --env AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_ID=your-client-id \
  --env AMERICANCLOUD_API_CLIENT_SECRET=your-client-secret \
  -- npx -y @americancloud/mcp --allow-writes

Claude Code asks permission before each tool call (configurable per tool), and destructive operations are explicitly flagged.

The build-and-deploy workflow

Where this setup shines: Claude Code combines American Cloud tools with your terminal. A single session can:

1. Write or modify your application code
2. Create a VM with your SSH key, configure firewall rules, and point DNS at it — via the MCP server
3. Deploy and verify over SSH — via your shell

Try:

Create a small Ubuntu VM in us-west with my SSH key, open ports 22 and 80, wait for it to come up, then install nginx over SSH and confirm it serves the default page.

Or for Kubernetes:

Fetch the kubeconfig for my production cluster and check whether all deployments are healthy.

Next steps

• Things to try — more prompt ideas
• Overview — service groups, --services scoping, and safety details