Control netplex. from Claude with MCP

netplex. ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server - the same protocol Claude Desktop, Claude Code and claude.ai use to call tools. Point an MCP-aware AI agent at it and you can build and drive labs in plain English: "create a lab with two routers and a switch, wire them, and start it" becomes a sequence of real tool calls, not a chat transcript that goes nowhere.

Every tool below is real and was called live before this page was published - not illustrative pseudocode.

Tools exposed: list_labs, create_lab, get_topology, add_node, add_link, delete_node, delete_link, start_lab, stop_lab, get_node_status, run_command (exec on a running node), list_images, get_catalog (browse the vendor image catalog), describe_topology (a human-readable summary of a lab), and test_under_network (clone a repo, run its tests against a peer under simulated latency/jitter/loss, report pass/fail - fully ephemeral, it creates and tears down its own lab).

Configure Claude Desktop - add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "netplex": {
      "command": "python3",
      "args": ["/path/to/netplex/tools/netplex-mcp/server.py"],
      "env": {
        "NETPLEX_URL": "http://localhost:8088",
        "NETPLEX_USER": "admin",
        "NETPLEX_PASS": "netplex"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop and the tools above become available to the model automatically - ask it to "list my labs" or "create a lab called staging with two Alpine hosts" and it calls the real REST API underneath, exactly like the Studio UI does.

Run it standalone (stdio transport, the MCP default):

NETPLEX_URL=http://localhost:8088 NETPLEX_USER=admin NETPLEX_PASS=netplex \
  python3 tools/netplex-mcp/server.py

Or over SSE for a web-facing client: python3 server.py --transport sse --port 9999.

Because every tool call is just the REST API underneath, anything the MCP server can do, the CLI or SDK can also do directly - see "CLI quickstart" and "The Python SDK" for the non-AI equivalents of the same operations.