Best way to use MCP Servers with Cursor in WSL

Cursor when it’s install on Windows and remoting into a WSL instance has an annoying limitation. Per https://docs.cursor.com/context/model-context-protocol#remote-development:

Cursor directly communicates with MCP servers from your local machine, either directly through stdio or via the network using sse. Therefore, MCP servers may not work properly when accessing Cursor over SSH or other development environments. We are hoping to improve this in future releases.

A lot of MCP tools are heavily integrated with your workspaces and the tools in them, and in WSL those are usually Linux installed tools (e.g Node scripts running on WSL Node.js/Bun) that you won’t be able to access by default. Since a lot of people use WSL explicitly so they don’t have to deal with the hell that is Windows command line (I’m still burned by the path limitations), we have a Problem.

Easy enough solution it turns out.

First, we can’t use the global MCP json as that’s configured in the cursor windows config. Instead you want to use a project config inside .cursor/mcp.json

A typical mcp server string you might get will look like this

npx -y convex@latest mcp start

You need to run it via the wsl bash command. The config will look like this:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "convex": {
      "command": "wsl",
      "args": ["bash", "-c", "'npx -y convex@latest mcp start'"]
    }
  }
}

Thanks to this post for the original assistance.