Setup & Configuration

Install the Central MCP Server to start monitoring your Central network through your AI assistant client.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, confirm you have:

• An HPE Aruba Networking Central account
• One of the supported MCP clients like Claude Desktop, Claude Code CLI, or GitHub Copilot Chat (with VSCode)

Install uv

uv is a Python package manager used to run the Central MCP server. Install it with the command for your platform:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | iex"

For additional installation methods including Homebrew, pip, winget, etc, see the full installation options.

Once installed, you can run this command to verify installation:

uv --version

Find your Base URL & API Credentials

You need three values from Central to configure your MCP server: CENTRAL_BASE_URL, CENTRAL_CLIENT_ID, and CENTRAL_CLIENT_SECRET.

Base URL

CENTRAL_BASE_URL refers to the API gateway base URL for your Central instance (e.g. https://us5.api.central.arubanetworks.com). You can check this guide to learn how to find your Base URL.

API Credentials

CENTRAL_CLIENT_ID, and CENTRAL_CLIENT_SECRET refer to the API Credentials that are needed to make API calls to Central. You can check out this guide to see the steps for how you can generate your API Credentials.

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Important Links

Ensure that the API credentials you create on HPE Greenlake Platform is for your HPE Aruba Networking Central instance.

How credentials stay secure

Credentials in the env block of an MCP config file are passed as OS-level environment variables to the server process at startup. The same mechanism as docker run -e KEY=val.

These values never appear in any message sent to the AI provider. The AI model only receives the data your tools return (your Central network data), not the credentials used to start the server.

• VS Code note: .vscode/mcp.json lives inside your project workspace. Add it to .gitignore so credentials are never committed to version control. See the Github Copilot in VS Code setup guide for details.
• One universal rule: Never type or paste credentials directly into the AI chat window. Anything typed into chat is sent to the AI provider.

Configure Your AI Client

Central MCP Server works with any MCP-compatible client. The guides below cover a few popular options, if your client supports MCP, follow its documentation to point it at uvx central-mcp-server with the three environment variables above.