Use Arcade with Claude Desktop

In this guide, you’ll learn how to connect Claude Desktop to a local Arcade server.

Prerequisites

Create an Arcade
Get an Arcade API key
Install Python 3.10 or higher
Verify your Python version by running python --version or python3 --version in your terminal.

Install Dependencies

Terminal


pip install arcade-ai
pip install arcade-google

See more of Arcade’s MCP Servers that can be installed.

Set up Claude Desktop

Download and open Claude Desktop
Claude Menu —> “Settings” —> “Developer” —> “Edit Config”
This will create a configuration file at:
- On Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
- On Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
Open the configuration file and replace the file contents with this:

Replace YOUR_ARCADE_API_KEY_HERE with your actual Arcade and /path/to/python with the path to your Python interpreter and /path/to/arcade with the path to the Arcade package.

JSON


{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arcade-stdio": {
      "command": "bash",
      "args": [
        "-c",
        "export ARCADE_API_KEY=YOUR_ARCADE_API_KEY_HERE && /path/to/python /path/to/arcade serve --mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. Upon restarting, you should have access to the Arcade you installed.