How to completely disable and remove the MCP server in Aspire 13?

[cofl]

My employer has an extremely strict no-AI-tools policy, to the point that "just don't use it" isn't an option. While there's documentation on disabling the Copilot integration, there does not seem to be an equivalent toggle for the MCP server, meaning we're hard-blocked from implementing newer Aspire versions.

Am I missing something, or is sticking to 9.5 our only option?

[cofl]

I found my answer buried in old documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals/dashboard/configuration?tabs=bash#mcp

For anyone else coming across this, the quick solution is to add the following to Properties/launchSettings.json in your Aspire project:

{
    "profiles": {
        "...for each profile...": {
            "environmentVariables": {
               ...
               "Dashboard__Mcp__Disabled": "true"
            }
        }
    }
}

This is likely something that should be added to https://aspire.dev/dashboard/mcp-server/.

[CZEMacLeod]

Really wish all ai stuff was behind an opt in flag, rather than opt out/disable, but at least there appears to be a way.

[davidfowl]

The MCP server is like a rest API for LLMs. It doesn't do anything unless you configure it in a client. It's sort of like blocking a gRPC endpoint. There's a security aspect of not exposing things by mistake but it's an just an endpoint until the user takes action and configures it with a client.

[cofl]

The opt-out rather than opt-in nature of a lot of these features is a bit annoying. It'd be nice if we instead could start with the bare minimum and enabled dashboard features as we wanted them. I'm imagining an API like

builder.Dashboard
    .FromProfile(AspireDashboardProfiles.None) // other options could include Minimal, Default, All, etc.
    .EnableOtel(options => {})
    .EnableMcp(options => options.IncludeByDefault())
    .EnableCopilot(options => {});