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Welcome to the Spacelift Intent open-source project! Intent is an MCP Server, that lets infrastructure engineers describe what they need in natural language and provisions it directly through calling provider APIs — skipping the Terraform/OpenTofu configuration layer entirely. It’s early and experimental, so expect rough edges, but that’s where you come in: try it out, tell us what works (and what doesn’t), and join the conversation in GitHub Discussions. This repo hosts the open-source core; there's also a fully managed version, built into Spacelift Platform - check out Spacelift Intent HERE.
Prerequisites:
- A compatible MCP host that supports stdio servers.
The easiest way to run Intent is using Docker:
Configure your MCP host to use the Docker container. See the Configuration section for provider credentials setup.
Install via Homebrew:
Download the newest binary from the Releases page.
Currently, we support running the server in:
Enable MCP support
Using Docker:
Using Homebrew or local binary:
Add the following configuration to your Claude Desktop config file:
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json Linux: ~/.config/claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Using Docker:
Using Homebrew or local binary:
Using Docker:
Using Homebrew or local binary:
Before you start to provision new resources, you need to provide credentials for the provider of your choice. You can do that by supplementing environment variables, the same way you'd do it for Terraform/OpenTofu configuration.
Example Claude Desktop configuration for AWS provider:
Using Docker:
Using local binary:
⚠️ IMPORTANT: Intent stores all infrastructure state in a SQLite database. If you remove the database directory or Docker volume, you will lose all state and Intent will no longer be able to manage your infrastructure resources. The actual cloud resources will remain, but Intent will not know about them.
For Docker users: Always mount a volume to persist the database (using -v ${HOME}/.spacelift-intent:/state as shown in examples above). Without a volume mount, state will be lost when the container stops.
For local binary users: The default state directory is ./.state/ in your current working directory. Back it up regularly or configure a custom location using DB_DIR.
You can modify the behavior of Intent server by setting up:
| --tmp-dir | TMP_DIR | /tmp/spacelift-intent-executor | Temporary directory for provider binaries and state |
| --db-dir | DB_DIR | ./.state/ | Directory containing DB files for persistent state |
Example Claude Desktop configuration:
Using Docker:
Using local binary:
Intent provides infrastructure-oriented MCP tools that help with the provisioning process:
| provider-search | Provider Discovery | Search for available providers in the OpenTofu registry |
| provider-describe | Provider Schema | Show provider configuration, supported resources, and data sources |
| provider-resources-describe | Provider Schema | Get schema and documentation for a specific resource type |
| provider-datasources-describe | Provider Schema | Get schema and documentation for a specific data source type |
| lifecycle-resources-create | Resource Lifecycle | Create a new managed resource and store in state |
| lifecycle-resources-update | Resource Lifecycle | Update an existing resource with new configuration |
| lifecycle-resources-delete | Resource Lifecycle | Delete an existing resource and remove from state (HIGH RISK) |
| lifecycle-resources-refresh | Resource Lifecycle | Refresh resource by reading current state to detect drift |
| lifecycle-resources-import | Resource Lifecycle | Import existing external resources into state |
| lifecycle-resources-operations | Resource Lifecycle | List operations performed on resources with filtering |
| lifecycle-datasources-read | Data Sources | Read data from any data source type (read-only) |
| state-get | State Management | Get stored state for a resource including dependencies |
| state-list | State Management | List all stored resource states |
| state-eject | State Management | Remove resource from state without deleting infrastructure |
| state-timeline | State Management | Get state timeline events with filtering and pagination |
| lifecycle-resources-dependencies-add | Dependency Management | Add a dependency relationship between two resources |
| lifecycle-resources-dependencies-get | Dependency Management | Get dependency relationships for a resource |
| lifecycle-resources-dependencies-remove | Dependency Management | Remove a dependency relationship (MEDIUM RISK) |
Intent MCP server is translating MCP requests (crafted by your LLM) to a deterministic provider plugin call. During the process, it stores all relevant information in a SQLite Database. The information it stores is:
- state_records - resource attributes for the future provider calls, saved during lifecycle-resources-create call
- dependency_edges - arbitrary dependencies add by calling lifecycle-resources-dependencies-add tool
- timeline_events - save/delete state events
- operations - each MCP tool call is a separate operation stored in the DB
Highlighted components are implemented by this repository
- Generate code and build the project:
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The binary will be available at ./bin/spacelift-intent
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Configure your MCP host to use the local binary (see Installation section)
