Use Arcade in Visual Studio Code

Prerequisites

1. Create an Arcade account
2. Get an Arcade API key
3. Create an Arcade MCP Gateway and select the tools you want to use

Set up Visual Studio Code

3. Download and open Visual Studio Code  (version 1.100.0 or higher)
4. Open the command palette and select MCP: Add Server…
5. Choose HTTP
6. Paste the URL of your MCP Gateway. You may see a warning about Dynamic Client Registration. You can ignore this.
7. Give your MCP server a name, like mcp-arcade
8. Add the API key as the bearer token within the Authorization header, and the email address that you used to sign up for the Arcade account as the Arcade-User-ID header

Visual Studio Code will update your mcp.json file, but you will manually need to add the headers above:

{
  "servers": {
    "mcp-arcade": {
      "url": "https://api.arcade.dev/mcp/<YOUR-GATEWAY-SLUG>",
      "type": "http",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer {arcade_api_key}",
        "Arcade-User-ID": "{arcade_user_id}"
      }
    }
  }
}