Short answer
To build an MCP server: install an official MCP SDK, declare your tools with typed inputs, optionally expose resources and prompts, run the server over stdio or HTTP, then connect an MCP client like Claude and test it. A minimal Python server is about ten lines; the work is in choosing what to expose and validating every input.
This is the build. For what MCP is, its three primitives, and how it differs from an API, start with what is the Model Context Protocol — this page assumes that and goes straight to code.
Prerequisites
You need very little to get a server running locally:
