Getting Started with Claude Desktop

Configure Collate's MCP Server to interact with Anthropic's AI assistant platform.

Prerequisites

For this guide, you will need:

• nvm
• OpenMetadata v1.8.0 - You can upgrade your version of Collate with this guide
• Claude Desktop

Add MCP App to Collate

Collate has a variety of applications to improve your data such as MetaPilot, Data Insights, Search Indexing, and MCP.

• Go to <YOUR-OpenMetadata-SERVER>/marketplace/apps/McpApplication and select Install

Install MCP Server on Collate

• The next screen, with Origin Header URI is for Streamable-Http requests. This guide uses SSE, so we can skip this portion, select Submit

Install mcp-remote

Next, we will be adding mcp-remote to Claude Desktop so we can give Claude secure access to your Collate MCP Server via support for HTTP+SSE.

• Install the latest node version

• Install mcp-remote globally*

*Note: Installing globally may require you to run as root sudo npm install -g mcp-remote

• Start mcp-remote

This will start mcp-remote's MCP Inspector on your localhost at http://127.0.0.1:6274/. Keep your terminal window open, you will see requests coming from Claude to OpenMetadata through mcp-remote in this window once you start prompting.

Adding your Collate PAT to mcp-remote

The next step will be to add your Personal Access Token (PAT) to mcp-remote so that Claude can communicate with Collate

• Go to <YOUR-OpenMetadata-SERVER>/users/<YOUR-USERNAME>/access-token and select Generate New Token. This will give Claude the same role and access policy that is assign to you in Collate, if you would like Claude to have different role-based access controls, create a new user.

Creating a new Personal Access Token

• Set your Token Expiration. This guide uses 60 days. Once your new token is created copy it.

Personal Access Token expires in 60 days

• Paste your PAT in mcp-remote's MCP Inspector.
  • MCP Inspector URL is http://127.0.0.1:6274/
  • Transport Type is SSE
  • URL is <YOUR-OpenMetadata-SERVER>/mcp/sse
  • Bearer Token is your PAT
  • Select Connect

Adding your Collate MCP Server to Claude Desktop

This how-to guide uses the free version of Claude Desktop for macOS with Sonnet 4.

• Navigate to Claude Desktop's Settings, then select Developer and Edit Config. Paste the following into claude_desktop_config.json

• Restart Claude Desktop. You should see your openmetadata service running

Collate MCP Server running in Claude Desktop

Prompt to read from Collate

This part of the guide assumes that you have assets in Collate that Claude can read, and that some of your data assets have references to customers. You can change the prompt accordingly and/or add data sources into OpenMetadata here.

Past the following prompt into Claude to have it read from Collate:

Claude will ask if it can use the external integration Collate, select Allow always. You may have to do this multiple times, once for each tool. Claude is now reading from Collate via its MCP Server!

Claude asking for permission to search Collate

Show us what you got

With MCP, we are finding new ways to use Collate all the time! Now that you have Claude and Collate configured to work together, think you've got a great new use case? Show us what you've got in the Collate #mcp Slack Channel!