Access and Manage Local Files Securely

Filesystem MCP is an MCP server that gives Claude secure access to your local filesystem, with configurable access controls. Rather than pasting file contents into a conversation by hand, Claude can read, write, search, and organize files directly, scoped to directories you explicitly allow.

Use it when you want Claude to work directly with files on disk: reading a config file, updating a value in it, searching a project for matching files, or reorganizing a directory, within one or more directories you have explicitly allowed. Access is restricted to the directories passed at startup, with no access to parent directories via "..", so it is not a way to give Claude open-ended access to your whole filesystem; each allowed directory has to be named explicitly. It fits local development and file-management tasks, not remote or cloud storage, which it doesn't address.

• read_file(path): read the contents of a file
• write_file(path, content): write content to a file
• list_directory(path): list the contents of a directory, returning file info
• create_directory(path): create a new directory
• move_file(source, destination): move or rename a file
• search_files(path, pattern): search for files matching a pattern
• Security controls: access restricted to the directories you specify, no traversal to parent directories, configurable read/write permissions, and path validation and sanitization

Install globally with npm:

npm install -g @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem

Then add it to your Claude Code settings, naming the directory or directories it should be allowed to access:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "filesystem": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem",
        "/path/to/allowed/directory"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Once configured, you can ask Claude directly to work with files in that directory, for example: "Claude, please read the contents of ./config/settings.json and update the database connection string."

Developers who want Claude to read, edit, search, and organize files in specific local directories as part of a coding or file-management workflow, with access limited to directories they explicitly allow.