使用说明

MCP Masterclass

Code and checkpoints for the MCP Masterclass, a free video course in 4 modules and 30 lessons on the Model Context Protocol. You build one server, called Scribe, end to end on the MCP Python SDK v2: it starts by reading a draft out of Google Drive, learns to edit the real document, gets a guard and a memory, and ends up deployed off your laptop where other people can install it. The whole course runs on the free Claude Desktop plan.

Course hub: genaiunplugged.com/courses/mcp

Watch

The whole course is one video: the full course video, all 30 lessons in 2.5 hours with a chapter per lesson. The lesson pages on the course site carry the video cued to the lesson, the full transcript, every code block, and the downloads.

Module	Starts at
1. The Whole Idea	0:00
2. Your First Server	50:40
3. Make It Trustworthy	1:18:43
4. Ship It	1:50:52

Playlist: MCP Masterclass

Lessons

Module 1: The Whole Idea

Checkpoint: checkpoints/module-1/ or scribe-checkpoint-m1.zip

#	Lesson
1	What you will have by the end	read
2	What MCP is	read
3	Get your machine ready	read
4	Give your helper a key to your Drive	read
5	The obvious ways, and where each one dies	read
6	Why MCP exists: M times N became M plus N	read
7	Host, Client, Server	read
8	Tools, Resources and Prompts	read
9	MCP versus API versus CLI	read
10	Module 1 recap	read

Module 2: Your First Server

Checkpoint: checkpoints/module-2/ or scribe-checkpoint-m2.zip

#	Lesson
11	The read-only wall	read
12	Your first MCP server: the tool that edits	read
13	Prove it changed the real document	read
14	Let Claude see the whole folder	read
15	Module 2 recap	read

Module 3: Make It Trustworthy

Checkpoint: checkpoints/module-3/ or scribe-checkpoint-m3.zip

#	Lesson
16	The quiet mistake	read
17	A fence, and a question before the write	read
18	Try to break your own server	read
19	Why every chat starts at zero	read
20	Give it a memory	read
21	Assignment: a tool that finds a past decision	read
22	Assignment solution	read
23	Module 3 recap	read

Module 4: Ship It

Checkpoint: checkpoints/module-4/ or scribe-checkpoint-m4.zip

#	Lesson
24	The last manual step	read
25	Add Substack: a whole new service, the same 5 steps	read
26	Draft to published, end to end	read
27	Off the laptop: the pipe and the web address	read
28	Deploy it, and publish it so others can install it	read
29	Module 4 recap	read
30	What you have, what breaks next, where to go	read

Checkpoints

Each module has a checkpoint holding the files you need at the start of it, so a bad afternoon in the previous module never ends the course. The folders under checkpoints/ are the same files as the zips on the course site, and checkpoints/README.md says what each one holds and which result line to expect from its checks. Grab the checkpoint at the start of the module, not after something breaks.

Getting started

You need:

Python 3.10 or newer
uv, or plain pip inside a virtual environment
Claude Desktop. A free account is enough.
A Google service account key, key.json, which lesson 4 walks you through. It is a password, so it is never in this repo and never will be.

Every requirements.txt pins the SDK to a range:

mcp[cli]>=2.1,<3

A lower bound alone is not a pin. The first version of this course said mcp>=1.0.0, which later resolved to version 2 and broke every sample it shipped with.

git clone https://github.com/genaiunplugged14/mcp-masterclass.git
cd mcp-masterclass/checkpoints/module-1

uv venv && source .venv/bin/activate     # or: python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -r requirements.txt       # or: pip install -r requirements.txt

python3 verify_drive_access.py key.json

You want to see RESULT: read yes. change yes. create no. at the bottom. If a read fails you almost certainly missed the sharing step in lesson 4: sharing the Drive folder with the service account's email is what grants access, and roles set in the Cloud console do not.

Each checkpoint carries a verify_claude_config.py that checks whether Claude Desktop actually started the servers you configured, and a claude_desktop_config.json with /FULL/PATH/TO/scribe as a placeholder. Every path in it must be absolute, and Claude Desktop has to be fully quit and reopened after you edit it. That is the single most common reason a server does not appear.

Older course

The first version of this course was 8 Substack articles in 2025. Its code is kept under archive/2025-article-course/, fixed for SDK v2 and tagged article-course-2025. Two of those articles stay up as standalone reads; the archive README links them.

Questions and fixes

Open an issue if something does not work and say which lesson and which checkpoint. Pull requests are welcome, especially if you spot code that has drifted out of date.

Links: newsletter and the Claude Code Builder cohort on Maven.

License

MIT. Use this code in your own projects freely.