# Smithery (/docs/discoverability/smithery)

[Smithery](https://smithery.ai) is the largest open marketplace for MCP servers. Publishing your xmcp server to Smithery makes it discoverable to other developers and gives you access to distribution analytics.

<Callout type="info">
  Smithery is a registry, not a hosting provider. You need to deploy your server yourself before publishing it.
</Callout>

## HTTP Servers

For servers using Streamable HTTP transport, Smithery Gateway acts as a proxy to your deployed server.

1. Deploy your xmcp server to a hosting provider (e.g. [Vercel](/docs/deployment/vercel), [Cloudflare](/docs/deployment/cloudflare))
2. Go to [smithery.ai/new](https://smithery.ai/new)
3. Enter your server's public HTTPS URL
4. Complete the publishing flow

## Stdio Servers

Stdio-based servers can be published to Smithery using the CLI. Users discover them on the marketplace and run them locally on their own machines via [mcpb](https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/mcpb).

```bash
smithery mcp publish --name @your-org/your-server --transport stdio
```

### Session Configuration

If your server needs user-provided values like API keys or settings, you can define a session configuration schema. For stdio servers, Smithery translates schema fields into command-line arguments in kebab-case format.

For example, given this schema:

```json
{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "apiKey": {
      "type": "string",
      "title": "API Key"
    },
    "model": {
      "type": "string",
      "title": "Model",
      "default": "gpt-4"
    }
  },
  "required": ["apiKey"]
}
```

Smithery will run your server as:

```bash
your-server --api-key=sk-xxx --model=gpt-4
```

Supported types are `string`, `number`, and `boolean`, with a maximum of 20 fields.

Learn more about session configuration and publishing in the [Smithery documentation](https://smithery.ai/docs/build/publish).