Wrong cwd in Zed IDE

[ziimakc]

Adding mcp in zed ide runs commands form home dir /home/ziimakc instead of project /home/ziimakc/apps/my-app/ cwd. Setting --workspace every time project changes is annoying.

  "context_servers": {
    "rust-mcp": {
      "enabled": true,
      "command": "rust-mcp-server",
      "args": ["--workspace", "/home/ziimakc/apps/my-app/"], // if args not provided, `/home/ziimakc` is used
      "env": {
        "RUST_LOG": "info",
      },
    },
  },

Expected behavior: mcp should run commands from cwd.

[Vaiz]

yeah, it's a known problem
I had some success with list_roots api. I'll experiment with it over the weekend

[Vaiz]

@ziimakc , unfortunately, zed doesn't support this API, do you have any suggestion how it can be done?

One of the things I could do is to add a new tool that sets workspace, but it would require agents to pass that info into MCP server which is not that different from asking them to pass manifest path in every call

[ziimakc]

@Vaiz I'm not sure what is the problem, shouldn't currently opened folder in zed be a root by default for mcp? based on zed-industries/zed#35354

Is it maybe a zed issue?

[Vaiz]

globally defined MCP servers usually start with user's home folder as cwd, VS Code behaves the same.
once it's started, it's hard to figure out what is the actual project directory

a workaround that I've been using is setting up mcp server per project in .vscode/mcp.json/.zed/settings.json. In that case server starts only when project is opened, and it has the same cwd as the project

example of configuration for zed

{
  "context_servers": {
    "rust-mcp-server": {
      "enabled": true,
      "remote": false,
      "command": "rust-mcp-server",
      "args": [],
      "env": {},
    },
  },
}

but this workaround is not scalable

[Vaiz]

I've filed a feature request to Zed for roots/list: zed-industries/zed#53156