Cowboy MCP 1.6.3: local development, first-class

By Andrew Ivanov · Last updated 2026-08-20

Cowboy MCP 1.6.3 is about the site on your laptop. A local WordPress install — Local, Studio, MAMP, DevKinsta, or anything on localhost — now works just as well with your AI agent as a live one: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gemini CLI connect with an API key exactly as they do in production, Claude Desktop connects through a small local bridge, and the plugin's own tooling knows which is which. The release is also tested against WordPress 7.1.

What this means for you

Until now the Connection tab and Connection Doctor assumed a public HTTPS site, so on a local install you got a fail for "hostname not publicly reachable" and a Claude Desktop setup that could not work without a tunnel. This release makes local development a first-class story: the plugin recognises a local site, tells you per client what works locally and what genuinely needs a public URL, and hands you the right config for each — with no tunnel exposing your dev site while you work.

What's new

Local sites recognised. The Connection tab detects local hostnames and private addresses and shows, per client, what works locally ("Works locally" for terminal agents and Claude Desktop) and what needs a public URL (claude.ai and ChatGPT, because they connect from the vendor's servers).
Claude Desktop on a local site. A ready-to-copy config that bridges Claude Desktop to your local site through mcp-remote, with the key step defaulting to a read-only scope so the safe path is the easy one.
Connection Doctor understands local. Plain HTTP on a local site now passes with local context, and the public-hostname check becomes a warning with fix steps for both local and public setups instead of a failure. The OAuth prerequisite check keeps its hard fail, because the desktop connector really does need a public HTTPS address.
Self-signed certificate help. On loopback hosts the snippets offer a plain-http variant, with a clear warning against disabling TLS verification globally.
WordPress 7.1. Tested with 7.1: the endpoint, handshake, tool catalog, and tool calls all verified on the current release.

Try it

claude mcp add --transport http my-local-site http://mysite.local/wp-json/cowboy-mcp/v1/endpoint --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Then: "List every page that is still a draft and tell me which ones have no featured image."

Read the full 1.6.3 changelog on WordPress.org.