MCP is a really dumb server that just takes requests and sends back data.

Somewhere in your frontend settings (Open-WebUI has it under “integrations” I believe, some backends can set these things too) you see a section called “MCP server”. You need to keep your MCP server running somewhere (it’s very slim, so not a huge deal usually) and then in those settings you put your IP and port for the server, for example “192.168.1.15:8080”. Usually if you did it right (sometimes you can check if it works in the settings), you can ask the model if it has access to the tools and it will tell you.

What’s happening in the background is that every conversation the AI does, it gets a short preamble with some context about what it can do, and if you connect web search, custom skills or an MCP server (it’s just skills but they are run through their own server basically), the AI sees all that in this preamble if it’s set up correctly. And then when it feels like it needs to use those tools, it will check the description on how to do that, and then it uses them.