Tidesman MCP Server

A free native MCP server for running and debugging Linux containers with Apple's container tool. The tidesman mcp server wraps that behind the Model Context Protocol, so an assistant can use it through 14 defined tools rather than through you.

Its toolset

Everything the assistant can do here goes through one of these:

• Website — https://tidesman.dev
• Contact — hello@tidesman.dev
• system_ping — Read
• system_disk_usage — Read
• system_repair — Write
• container_list — Read
• container_inspect — Read
• container_logs — Read
• container_run — Write
• container_exec — Write
• container_start — Write
• container_restart — Write

Adding it to your client

Setup follows the usual MCP pattern — install or clone the server, register it in your client's configuration file, restart the client.

Configuration

• An Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 26 (Apple's container runtime requires both). - Apple's container installed and started: container system start.

When to reach for it

This sits in the developer tooling group, where several servers overlap in what they claim to do but differ sharply once you actually set them up. Tidesman's toolset — Website, Contact, system_ping and 11 more — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by dev.tidesman; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

We check each listing at SyncDev against the project's documentation before it goes live — if something here drifts out of date, it is a bug worth reporting.

Caveats

• It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
• With 14 tools registered it takes up a noticeable share of the context window; turn it off in projects that never touch Tidesman.
• MCP clients confirm each tool call by default. Leave that on until you have watched what the tidesman mcp server does with a few real requests.