Talk to your antsle: antsle-mcp v0.1.0 prerelease (unofficial)

Hi all,

Have you ever wanted to just ask your antsle what it's up to? I built a thing for that.

antsle-mcp is an unofficial MCP server that connects AI assistants like Claude to antMan's REST API. Because it speaks standard MCP, it should also work with other MCP-capable AI assistants, not just Claude. Once it's set up, you can manage your antlets in plain English:

"Which antlets are running?"
"Snapshot webserver before I break it."
"How full is my zpool?"

It's free, open source under GPL-3.0, and currently tested against antMan 3.4.4.

To be clear, this is a personal project, not an official antsle product. Please don't call antsle support if it misbehaves.

What it can do

List, create, clone, start, stop, resize and delete antlets
Create, restore and delete snapshots
Browse and install templates
Inspect vNICs, vDisks, vLANs, port forwards, load balancer rules and backups
Check host status including CPU, RAM, zpool usage and services

It's careful by design

Read-only is the default. Write tools aren't even loaded until you turn read-only off.
The assistant is told to inspect before changing anything, confirm antlet names before destructive actions, offer a snapshot before risky changes, and prefer a normal stop over force-stop.
Host-level actions like shutdown, upgrades and network commits are intentionally left to you in the antMan UI.

Install

As a Claude Code plugin, read-only by default:

/plugin marketplace add davekopecek/antsle-mcp
/plugin install antsle-mcp@antsle-mcp

When you enable it, it asks for your antsle URL, username and password. The password is stored in your system's credential store.

You can also clone the repo and use a .env file, or run it with:

npx -y github:davekopecek/antsle-mcp

Those methods also work with other MCP clients such as Claude Desktop. See the README for details. You'll need Node 22 or newer.

Things to try

Once it's connected, just ask:

"List my antlets."
"Which antlets are running, and how much RAM is each one using?"
"Give me a health check of my antsle."
"How full is my zpool?"
"Show me the snapshots for my web antlet."
"What templates can I install?"
"What port forwards do I have set up?"

Once you're comfortable and have turned off read-only:

"Snapshot my web antlet before I upgrade it."
"Clone my test antlet so I can experiment on the copy."
"Bump my database antlet to 8 GB of RAM."

Feedback wanted

This is v0.1.0, a prerelease, so expect some rough edges. I'd especially like to know:

Does it work with your antMan version?
What's broken, confusing or missing?
What would you like to ask your antsle that it can't answer yet?

Reply here or open an issue on GitHub:

https://github.com/davekopecek/antsle-mcp

Have fun, and please snapshot before you experiment. With great power comes great responsibility. Or, to quote a guy who used to work for me: "It works on my machine." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dave