toolhive-cli-user

A guide to ToolHive CLI, a command-line program for running and managing MCP servers locally. MCP servers are small services that give AI agents access to tools or data.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps run servers from a registry, container image, package, configuration file, or remote URL; list their status; manage secrets and permissions; and configure clients or groups.
Why use it?
It explains how to start, inspect, configure, secure, and stop these local services without having to remember every command or setup option.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/stacklok/toolhive/toolhive-cli-user
Any agent
npx skills add stacklok/toolhive --skill toolhive-cli-user
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stacklok/toolhive

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 98 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,601 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00098 $0.02601
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.01300
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00520
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00260

Measured yesterday against content hash e1e49a809c99, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

toolhive-cli-user scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/toolhive-cli-user/SKILL.md · 263 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 263 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ToolHive CLI User Guide

Prerequisites

  • Container Runtime: Docker, Podman, Colima, or Rancher Desktop (with dockerd/moby)
  • ToolHive CLI: Install with brew install stacklok/tap/thv (macOS/Linux) or winget install stacklok.thv (Windows)

Verify: thv version

Quick Start

thv run filesystem      # Run server from registry
thv list                # List running servers
thv status filesystem   # Detailed server info
thv logs filesystem     # View logs
thv stop filesystem     # Stop server
thv rm filesystem       # Remove server

Running MCP Servers

Five input methods: registry name, container image, protocol scheme (uvx://, npx://, go://), exported config (--from-config), or remote URL.

thv run filesystem                                          # Registry
thv run ghcr.io/github/github-mcp-server:latest -- <args>   # Container image
thv run uvx://mcp-server-git                                # Python (uvx)
thv run npx://@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem       # Node.js (npx)
thv run go://github.com/example/mcp-server                  # Go
thv run --from-config ./config.json                         # Exported config
thv run https://api.example.com/mcp --name my-remote        # Remote URL

For all flags, authentication options, and telemetry configuration, see COMMANDS.md. For detailed usage patterns, see EXAMPLES.md.

Managing Servers

thv list                          # Running servers
thv list --all                    # Include stopped
thv list --format json            # JSON output
thv list --format mcpservers      # MCP client config format
thv list --group production       # Filter by group

thv status filesystem             # Detailed server info (URL, port, transport, uptime)
thv status filesystem --format json

thv stop filesystem github        # Stop specific servers
thv stop --all                    # Stop all

thv start filesystem              # Resume stopped server
thv start --all                   # Start all stopped servers
thv start --group development     # Start all in group
thv restart filesystem            # Alias for start (backward compat)

thv rm filesystem github          # Remove servers
thv rm --all                      # Remove all

thv logs filesystem               # Container logs
thv logs filesystem --follow      # Real-time
thv logs filesystem --proxy       # Proxy logs
thv logs prune                    # Clean orphaned logs

Read the full file on GitHub · 263 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 263 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A e1e49a809c99

Subscribe to this mod's changes

toolhive-cli-user is a skill published in the GitHub repository stacklok/toolhive (2,056 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 2,601 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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