Camel Quarkus

AI-assisted Development

Quarkus ships a Quarkus Agent MCP server that exposes extension skills, documentation search and Dev UI tooling to AI coding assistants via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Camel Quarkus plugs into it with a built-in skill. One MCP server, nothing else to install.

Built-in Camel Quarkus skills

Camel Quarkus extensions can ship a skill inside their deployment JAR (META-INF/quarkus-skill.md). The quarkus_skills MCP tool discovers each skill automatically in any project depending on that extension. No additional setup is required.

Currently, camel-quarkus-core ships the main Camel Quarkus skill and camel-quarkus-bean ships guidance for calling CDI beans from routes.

The core skill teaches the AI agent to:

  • Prefer the type-safe Endpoint DSL (EndpointRouteBuilder) for defining routes, so that endpoint options are checked at compile time

  • Look up endpoint options in the Camel catalog metadata embedded in each component JAR, or in the versioned component documentation, instead of guessing URI parameters

  • Validate routes with the camel-report-maven-plugin:validate goal before delivering them

  • Follow CDI injection patterns for CamelContext, ProducerTemplate, and named beans

  • Prefer @CamelQuarkusTest for JVM-mode tests (plain @QuarkusTest when no Camel-specific features are needed), never extend CamelTestSupport, and avoid @Inject in @QuarkusIntegrationTest native tests

  • Apply @RegisterForReflection on classes accessed via reflection in native mode

Dev MCP tools

When the application runs in dev mode, the camel-quarkus-core extension also exposes Dev MCP tools, proxied by the Quarkus Agent MCP server:

  • camelCatalogDoc — Camel catalog documentation of a component (endpoint URI syntax and options), from the exact Camel version of the application, with optional keyword filtering

  • camelValidateEndpointUri — validates an endpoint URI against the application’s catalog: unknown options (with suggestions), invalid values, missing required options

The built-in skill instructs agents to prefer these tools over static lookups whenever dev mode is running.

No setup is needed when the tools are accessed through the Quarkus Agent MCP server. To connect an MCP client directly instead, enable Dev MCP in the Dev UI settings dialog (Dev MCP tab): the tools are then served at http://localhost:8080/q/dev-mcp, and the tab lists the connected clients.

Setting up the Quarkus Agent MCP server

Follow the Quarkus Agent MCP guide to install and configure the server for your IDE or AI coding assistant.

Once active, the assistant loads the Camel Quarkus skill via quarkus_skills before generating code, and can manage the application lifecycle, run tests, and search the Quarkus documentation through the same server.

Optional: Camel MCP server

Apache Camel also provides a standalone Camel MCP server exposing the full Camel catalog as MCP tools, plus authoring and runtime tooling built around Camel CLI.

It is not required for Camel Quarkus development, and its runtime tools (such as camel_run) target standalone Camel CLI integrations rather than Quarkus applications. Its catalog tools can still be a useful complement if you work with both runtimes.