Gov AI Client

A thin chat client for connecting to MCP Servers

Local development

To run the frontend application, use the following command:

make install
make run_frontend

Using GovAI Client in your own app

See the example app in this repo for a ready-to-go docker-compose.yml config.

MCP configuration

Please copy the .mcp-servers-example.yaml file to .mcp-servers.yaml

By default the app is configured to talk to a local MCP test server.

For this to work, you'll need to run the server yourself:

cd mcp-server-demo
npm install
npm run start

If the correct values are set in .mcp-servers.yaml, the app will also attempt to connect to a Caddy MCP server at that URL.

Additional MCP servers can be added to this file.

An MCP_SERVERS env var can also be set that overrides the yaml file. See .env.example for an example of this.

Frontend

The Frontend uses Astro and Lit. There is a readme specific to Astro in the frontend directory.

The app is designed to work without JavaScript (for progressive enhancement), and with JavaScript added to provide enhancements such as streaming.

Tests

End-to-end tests using Playwright are located in the /tests directory.

cd tests
npm install
npx playwright test

Deployment

Builds

The docker images for the services will be built on every push to any branch by the github actions.

Releases

• Running make release env=<env> to release any commit to dev or preprod.
• Pushing to main will release to prod.