Getting started with Snyk Studio

Feature availability

The Snyk MCP Server is designed as a local MCP server, running on your system using the Snyk CLI to ensure local file access.

Snyk does not offer a hosted remote MCP server.

Prerequisites

Snyk recommends that you have:

• npx

• Node.js installed on your machine

If these are not available to you, the Snyk CLI can be manually introduced in the MCP server configuration. For instructions on how to do so, refer to your coding assistant's official documentation.

Configure the Snyk MCP server

Navigate to the coding assistant MCP server configuration setup. This often involves modifying a file called mcp.json or similar. The following snippet can be used to configure the Snyk MCP server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "Snyk": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "snyk@latest", "mcp", "-t", "stdio"],
      "env": {}
    }
  }
}

To validate the MCP server configuration, prompt your coding agent with natural language, for example, "scan my directory for security issues".

Configure the Snyk MCP profile

Snyk supports three tool profiles that let you control which tools are available to your AI agent. Profiles help you balance token cost and capability based on your needs.

The available profiles are:

Profile type	Description
Lite	The minimum set of essential security scanning tools. Ideal for keeping token use and context size low.
Full (default)	All stable tools. Provides comprehensive security coverage across code, dependencies, containers, IaC, and SBOMs.
Experimental	Everything in the full profile, plus new tools under evaluation. These may change or be promoted to full in future releases.

These tools are available for the following profile types:

Tool	Lite profile	Full profile	Experimental profile
snyk_auth
snyk_code_scan
snyk_sca_scan
snyk_version
snyk_logout
snyk_trust
snyk_send_feedback
snyk_container_scan
snyk_iac_scan
snyk_sbom_scan
snyk_aibom
snyk_package_health_check

To set a profile, use either the --profile CLI flag or the SNYK_MCP_PROFILE environment variable CLI flag:

npx -y snyk@latest mcp -t stdio --profile=lite

mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "Snyk": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "snyk@latest", "mcp", "-t", "stdio"],
      "env": {
        "SNYK_MCP_PROFILE": "experimental"
      }
    }
  }
}

If a profile is not specified in setup, the profile defaults to full.

Configure Secure at inception directives

The Secure at inception directives are used to guide agents to test for security issues at the time of code generation. To learn how to configure these directives with code examples, visit Secure at inception directives.

Configure Remediation directives

Remediation directives are commands that can be used to accelerate the remediation of pre-existing security issues. To learn how to configure these directives with code examples, visit Remediation directives.

Snyk maintains quickstart guides for some of the more common coding assistants. For detailed configuration steps of a specific coding assistant, visit Quickstart guides.