Quick Start Guide

December 17, 2025 · View on GitHub

This guide will help you get up and running with the Trivy MCP Server Plugin quickly.

Installation

If you haven't installed the plugin yet:

trivy plugin install mcp

See the Installation Guide for more details.

Starting the MCP Server

To start the Trivy MCP server:

trivy mcp

By default, this will start the server using stdio transport, which is suitable for most IDE integrations.

Basic Configuration Options

You can customize the server behavior with these options:

Option	Values	Default	Description
`--transport` / `-t`	`streamable-http`, `sse`, `stdio`	`stdio`	Transport protocol for the MCP Server
`--host` / `-H`		`localhost`	Host/interface to listen on (network transports)
`--port` / `-p`		23456	Port for network transport modes
`--trivy-binary`			Custom Trivy binary path (optional)
`--use-aqua-platform` / `-a`	`true/false`	`false`	Enable Aqua Platform integration
`--debug`	`true/false`	`false`	Enable debug logging

Examples with different transports:

# Streamable HTTP transport
trivy mcp --transport streamable-http --host localhost --port 8080

# SSE transport
trivy mcp --transport sse --host localhost --port 8080

# Listen on all interfaces (allows remote connections)
trivy mcp --transport sse --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080

IDE Configuration

The Trivy MCP Server Plugin works with various IDEs, including VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains IDEs, and Claude Desktop.

For detailed configuration instructions for each IDE, see:

Basic Usage

Once configured, you can use natural language to ask security-related questions in your IDE's chat interface. Make sure to use the chat window in "Agent" mode, not "Ask" mode.

Example queries:

Are there any vulnerabilities or misconfigurations in this project?

Find all HIGH severity vulnerabilities in this codebase

For more example queries, see the Example Queries page.

Next Steps

Explore Authentication to integrate with Aqua Platform
Try out different Example Queries to learn more about what you can do