### Overview
Major restructuring from monolithic `arcade-ai` package to modular
library architecture with standardized uv-based dependency management.
### New Package Structure
- **`arcade-tdk`** - Lightweight toolkit development kit (core
decorators, auth)
- **`arcade-core`** - Core execution engine and catalog functionality
- **`arcade-serve`** - FastAPI/MCP server components
- **`arcade-ai`** - Meta package that includes CLI functionality.
Optionally include evals via the `evals` extra. Optionally include all
packages via the `all` extra.
### Key Benefits
- **Lighter Dependencies**: Toolkits now depend only on `arcade-tdk` (~2
deps) vs full `arcade-ai` (~30+ deps)
- **Faster Builds**: uv provides 10-100x faster dependency resolution
and installation
- **Better Modularity**: Clear separation of concerns, consumers import
only what they need
- **Standard Tooling**: Eliminates custom poetry scripts, uses standard
Python packaging
### Migration Impact
- All 20 toolkits converted from poetry → uv with `arcade-tdk`
dependencies plus `arcade-ai[evals]` and `arcade-serve` dev
dependencies. When developing locally, devs should install toolkits via
`make install-local`.
- Modern Python 3.10+ type hints throughout
- Standardized build system with hatchling backend
- Enhanced Makefile with robust toolkit management commands
- Removed `arcade dev` CLI command
- Reduce the number of files created by `arcade new` and add an option
to not generate a tests and evals folder.
This foundation enables faster development cycles and cleaner dependency
chains for the growing toolkit ecosystem.
### Todo After this PR is merged
- [ ] Post-merge workflow(s) (release & publish containers, etc)
- [ ] Release order plan. @EricGustin suggests releasing in the
following order:
1. `arcade-core` version 0.1.0
2. `arcade-serve` version 0.1.0 and `arcade-tdk` version 0.1.0
3. `arcade-ai` version 2.0.0
4. Patch release for all toolkits (all changes in toolkits are internal
refactors)
- [ ] [Update docs](https://github.com/ArcadeAI/docs/pull/318)
---------
Co-authored-by: Eric Gustin <eric@arcade.dev>
Co-authored-by: Eric Gustin <34000337+EricGustin@users.noreply.github.com>
MCP stdio Implementation:
The PR adds support for standard input/output (stdio) as a transport
mechanism for the Message Control Protocol. This is a replacement to the
SSE (Server-Sent Events) transport that was worked on in PR #359 but
will not be merged as it's not deprecated.
This will allow developers to use Arcade tools (written by the dev or
Arcade) in Claude, Cursor, windsurf, etc.
The engine Gateway already supports adding HTTPS streamable (replacement
for SSE) MCP servers as tool servers, and will soon support full gateway
capability in the client API as well.
To use any existing Toolkit just
## Examples
### Quickstart setup with existing toolkits
```bash
pip install arcade-ai
pip install <name of toolkit> # ex. arcade-google
arcade serve --mcp
```
### Run with Claude
Just add the following to the Claude config
```json
{
"mcpServers": {
"arcade": {
"command": "bash",
"args": ["-c", "export ARCADE_API_KEY=arc_xxxx && /path/to/python /path/to/arcade serve --mcp"]
}
}
}
```
### Customizing the Tool Server
Developers can customize their served tools and server furthermore by
importing the worker sdk
```python
import arcade_google # pip install arcade_google
import arcade_search # pip install arcade_search
from arcade.core.catalog import ToolCatalog
from arcade.worker.mcp.stdio import StdioServer
# 2. Create and populate the tool catalog
catalog = ToolCatalog()
catalog.add_module(arcade_google) # Registers all tools in the package
catalog.add_module(arcade_search)
# 3. Main entrypoint
async def main():
# Create the worker with the tool catalog
worker = StdioServer(catalog)
# Run the worker
await worker.run()
if __name__ == "__main__":
import asyncio
asyncio.run(main())
```
Then to run with claude, just run this python file instead of the prebuilt server used in ``arcade serve --mcp``
