Canvas LMS Skill Guide

This skill guide provides the entry point for utilizing the Canvas LMS MCP Server tools to interact with Canvas APIs.

Setup / Initialization

Before executing any Canvas LMS tasks, start and connect to the MCP server using the following command:

npm --silent --prefix canvas-lms-mcp start

[!IMPORTANT] Always run with the --silent flag. If --silent is omitted, npm writes startup banners to stdout, which corrupts the stdio JSON-RPC protocol stream and causes the agent connection to fail.

Make sure the following environment variables are supplied:

• CANVAS_API_TOKEN: The API access token generated from Canvas User Settings.
• CANVAS_BASE_URL: The URL of your Canvas instance (e.g. https://nu.instructure.com/).