zoedsoupe

zoedsoupe

Anubis (formerly Hermes) MCP - Model Context Protocol Implementation for Elixir

update (since 2025-07-24)

the project got forked and rebranded to anubis-mcp, since i not on CloudWalk anymore and can’t ensure they will have interest of maintaining the original project. the fork happened from the v0.13.0 and i’m tracking the opened issues on hermes while developing new features and following the feedback from this thread. thanks for the attention!

original description

Hey folks!

I would like to introduce hermes-mcp, a comprehensive elixir implementation of the https://spec.modelcontextprotocol.io/ that we’ve been building and using in production at CloudWalk. MCP enables standardized communication between LLMs and external tools, and we’re excited to share what we’ve built with the community.

current state & protocol support

hermes provides both client and server implementations with full support for the MCP spec:

  • draft & 2024-11-05 spec: complete implementation
  • 2025-03-26 spec: partial (missing OAuth authentication)
  • 2025-06-18 spec: on the roadmap

client architecture

the client supports multiple transport layers:

  • STDIO
  • SSE (Server-Sent Events)
  • WebSocket
  • Streamable HTTP

what’s interesting about the architecture is how it leverages OTP patterns. each client runs as a supervised process tree:
Client.Supervisor
├── Client.Base (handles MCP protocol and state management)
└── Transport Process (manages I/O and acts like a bridge between external world and the client process)

you can use it either as a long-running process or spawn one-off clients for specific tasks. the supervision strategy ensures fault tolerance based on the :one_for_all strategy.

server architecture

the server implementation supports:

  • STDIO, SSE, and Streamable HTTP transports
  • direct integration with Plug/Phoenix applications
  • component-based design for tools, prompts, and resources
  • low level implementation or higher-level where the library handle most of the requests/notifications

the server supervision tree adapts based on transport type:
Server.Supervisor
├── Session.Supervisor (for HTTP transports)
├── Server.Base (protocol handler)
└── Transport Process

production usage

we’re currently running hermes in production at CloudWalk, powering capabilities for JIM, our financial assistant serving hundreds of thousands of users across Brazil. our setup includes:

  • as MCP client: both local and clusterized deployments providing server capabilities to JIM
  • as MCP server (in progress): building a clusterized implementation using Horde for JIM to expose capabilities to external clients like Claude Desktop

why elixir for MCP?

Have you thought about how elixir’s concurrency model maps perfectly to MCP’s architecture? each session gets its own supervised process, state management is clean through genservers, and the fault tolerance means a single bad request won’t bring down your integration. plus, with libraries like Horde, we can easily distribute MCP servers across nodes.

looking for community input

some questions we’re exploring:

  • what patterns have you found useful for managing stateful connections with external services?
  • how are you handling protocol version negotiation in your APIs?
  • anyone else working with MCP or similar AI tool protocols?

we’d particularly love feedback on:

  • the component-based server design (using use Hermes.Server.Component)
  • our approach to transport abstraction and supervision tree architecture
  • ideas for the clusterized server implementation and possible edge cases/caveats

The library is available on

Documentation is on anubis_mcp v0.17.0 — Documentation

What challenges are you facing with LLM integration that MCP and maybe hermes-mcp might help solve?

Most Liked

zoedsoupe

zoedsoupe

hey everyone!

I’m the core maintainer of hermes-mcp, which has grown to 30k+ downloads and 250+ GitHub stars. Since i’m not working anymore on the Cloudwalk org and I’m uncertain about their long-term maintenance plans for the project, I’ve decided to fork and rebrand it as Anubis MCP :wolf:

What’s the situation:

  • I’ve been the primary developer and maintainer of hermes-mcp
  • Given corporate uncertainties, I want to ensure the community has a guaranteed maintained version
  • Anubis MCP is already published following the same latest release
  • I’m tracking all existing issues and pull requests from the original

What you get:

  • Same battle-tested Elixir MCP implementation
  • Continued active development and community support
  • All the performance and reliability you’re used to
  • Same API, easy migration path

The name Anubis felt fitting - as the Egyptian god of transitions, it seemed appropriate for guiding this project through its own transition. Plus, sometimes you need a deity of change to help you… transition :transgender_flag:

If you’re currently using hermes-mcp, I’d encourage migrating to anubis-mcp for guaranteed ongoing support and development.

Repository: GitHub - zoedsoupe/anubis-mcp: Elixir Model Context Protocol (MCP) SDK (hermes-mcp fork)
Hex: anubis_mcp | Hex

Would love your continued support and feedback! And now i have more free time to take care about more delicate parts of the project, like documentation ^-^

netProphET

netProphET

I’ve gotten a proof of concept working of a Hermes.Server that can register and call AshAi tools. It’s enough of a “walking skeleton” that it seems worth exploring further.

josevalim

josevalim

Creator of Elixir

What we did in Tidewave was to allow the tool to specify if it is stateful or not. If it is stateful, it runs within the SSE/frame process and receives the frame state argument. Otherwise, it just runs within its request process. If no tools are stateful, then there is no need for the session ID.

And for the frame/SSE process location, you can use a registry. I would start with Erlang’s built in global.

Finally, I think a MCP library has to solve two separate problems: the implementation of the MCP protocol and the abstraction for defining tools. I would suggest solving them separately. For example, MCP protocol implementation could do all negotiation and then call a module for listing and invoking tools, without actually caring how these tools are defined.

zoedsoupe

zoedsoupe

hey @ziinc!

  1. yes! i would like to make the server architecture more reliable/stable and then allow users to customize/extend it like with custom HTTP clients or even session stores, which cover the nest topic
  2. yeah, i over complicated the session managed and sincerely i should ditch it totally and merge with the frame concept since as i already said on this thread, “session” in the perspective of MCP is an internal technical detail and should not be exposed to users directly (at least the management). we already have a auto-cleanup/auto-close feature tho, but ETS is way better in this case and we could extend it as said on 1. making an interface for whim would to store session on other stores like redis.
  3. i don’t think is possible to do that actually, although it seems to be better, it need to hold state but we can think of it as a router? so sessions process the message and answer directly to the transport/SSE process
  4. yes! i will be doing that

thanks for the feedback, i’ll be tackling it in the next weeks and i generally agree with all points! also remembering that i forked the original repo to anubis-mcp

LostKobrakai

LostKobrakai

I’ve adjused the title.

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