Claude MCP tutorial: build and publish a website by chatting
A practical Claude MCP tutorial: connect Claude to ReDock's local MCP server and go from empty Mac to a published website in one conversation.
The fastest Claude MCP tutorial is to give Claude tools that produce something you can look at. In this walkthrough, you’ll connect Claude to ReDock — a free (alpha) macOS app whose entire surface is an MCP server on localhost:47200 — and take a website from nonexistent to published in one conversation. No terminal, no config-file surgery.
You need a Mac (macOS 12+), ReDock, and an MCP client: Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or Cursor. That’s the whole bill of materials.
Step 1: Install ReDock and connect Claude
Install ReDock from the install guide and open it. The app runs local websites — WordPress, headless WordPress, Astro, Next.js, Node.js, Bun — each at a real https://name.test domain with a locally trusted certificate. The MCP server starts with the app; nothing extra to launch.
Then point your client at localhost:47200. The per-client steps are in the MCP docs; if you’re on Claude Desktop specifically, the Claude Desktop walkthrough covers it. Once connected, Claude can list ReDock’s tools — that tool list is the entire integration.
Step 2: Create a site by asking
In your Claude client, try:
Create a WordPress site called “studio” and start it.
Claude calls the site-creation tool, ReDock provisions WordPress with PHP and MySQL, and the site comes up at https://studio.test with a trusted certificate. When Claude reports the site is running, that status is mapped from real process state — ReDock’s “honest state” rule means the tools never report success they didn’t verify.
Open https://studio.test in your browser. Real site, real HTTPS, zero terminal.
Step 3: Author content with real blocks
Here’s where an MCP server built for the job differs from a generic one. Ask:
Write a homepage for a two-person design studio. Use a hero pattern, a services section, and a contact section.
Claude authors through real Gutenberg blocks and patterns — not raw HTML pasted into a field. That matters later: when a human opens the page in the editor, it’s editable the way WordPress content should be. Claude can also magic-login to wp-admin for you, so reviewing its work never involves finding a password.
Iterate the way you’d iterate with a colleague: “make the hero shorter,” “add a pricing page,” “swap the services into a three-column pattern.” Each request is a handful of tool calls. The first-site guide covers the same flow click-by-click if you want the manual baseline. If WordPress is your main stack, WordPress as an MCP surface goes deeper.
Step 4: Share a preview
Before publishing, get eyes on it:
Share this site so I can send someone a link.
ReDock creates an unlisted QuickShare URL through a Cloudflare tunnel — your local site, reachable by whoever has the link, while it keeps running on your Mac. You can also claim a named subdomain under redock.xyz for something more stable. Details in the sharing docs.
Step 5: Publish
For a static site (say you built with Astro or Next.js instead — ReDock runs those too), publishing is one more request:
Deploy this site.
ReDock deploys to Cloudflare Workers static assets, and you can attach a custom domain. The deploy docs cover domains and details. Conversation start to public URL, without leaving the chat.
What you just learned, generalized
Strip away the specifics and the tutorial teaches the MCP loop itself: a server publishes tools, Claude picks them based on their descriptions, calls them with structured arguments, and reads real results back. Everything else — WordPress, tunnels, deploys — is just what these particular tools happen to do. For the conceptual grounding, read What is MCP?; for the full catalog of what Claude can reach here, see the MCP tools list.
FAQ
Do I need to write any code for this tutorial?
No. Install two apps (ReDock and an MCP client), connect them, and everything after that is conversation. Claude writes the content; ReDock runs the infrastructure.
Which Claude client should I use?
Any of them. Claude Desktop is the easiest for non-developers; Claude Code and Cursor fit if you’re already living in a terminal or editor. All three speak the same protocol to the same endpoint.
What does this cost?
ReDock is free, including sharing and Cloudflare Workers deploys. The paid part is ReDock Web, the dashboard for the live WordPress sites you look after for clients; nothing in this post needs it.
The best way to understand MCP is to ship one small thing with it — download ReDock and run this tutorial for real.