GitHub Copilot

Add Scalebrowser to GitHub Copilot in VS Code through mcp.json.

Copilot reads MCP servers from VS Code's mcp.json. Note the top-level key: it is servers, not the mcpServers most other clients use.

Before you start

Everything below assumes a daemon that is already running and a token to reach it with.

Windows desktop app

The app starts the daemon for you. The token is the contents of %LOCALAPPDATA%\Scalebrowser\token, and the address it is listening on is the native_addr field of %LOCALAPPDATA%\Scalebrowser\runtime.json. That is usually 127.0.0.1:8787, but the app moves up a port when something else already holds it.

Self-hosted daemon

scalebrowser-daemon --generate-token prints a token and stores it under <data_dir>/token. The address is whatever bind_addr says, which is 127.0.0.1:8787 unless you changed it. See Install & run.

The token is a full-power credential. It reaches every profile, every stored session and the whole management API. Treat it like a password: keep it out of a repository, and prefer your client's environment-variable syntax over a literal in a config file that gets committed.

Add the server

.vscode/mcp.json in a workspace applies to that workspace. For every workspace, run MCP: Open User Configuration from the command palette, which opens ~/.copilot/mcp-config.json.

.vscode/mcp.jsonjson

{
  "servers": {
    "scalebrowser": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8787/v1/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer ${input:scalebrowser-token}"
      }
    }
  },
  "inputs": [
    {
      "id": "scalebrowser-token",
      "type": "promptString",
      "description": "Scalebrowser API token",
      "password": true
    }
  ]
}

The ${input:…} form makes VS Code ask for the token once and keep it out of the file. Worth doing for the workspace copy, which is in your repository.

Open the Copilot chat view in agent mode and the tools appear under the tools picker.

What the agent can do now

Ask it to open a page and it will lease a profile, bind a tab and start reading. The tool set, the page map and the failure shapes are on MCP server; what the agent is allowed to do is decided by the daemon, not by the client, so see tool profiles.