Understand, Enhance, and Troubleshoot Your Apps with the Forge MCP Server

The recent release of the Forge MCP Server is set to revolutionize Forge app development—making it easier than ever, even for non-developers, to add powerful capabilities to Jira and Confluence.

Let me show the capabilities I use most frequently to help you make the most of it right away.

These capabilities include:

• Forge apps understanding
• Apps enhancements planning and execution
• Help with troubleshooting

No matter which stage you’re at—understanding, enhancing, or troubleshooting your app—working iteratively with the Forge MCP Server will help you achieve the best results.

Where can you use the Forge MCP Server?

The Forge MCP Server can be used in any coding agents and AI-powered IDEs. The Get started with the Forge MCP Server shows you how to connect it with Cursor, VS Code, Rovo Dev CLI or any tool supporting an MCP Server. This means you can leverage the Forge MCP Server in your favorite development environment, streamlining your workflow.

Understand any app, its code, and logic

When getting started with an app—whether it’s a sample app, one written by someone else, or created from a template—it can be challenging to understand how all the pieces fit together.

Let’s take as an example this app (link), which creates a custom field by reading from an external source. With the Forge MCP Server, you can begin by simply asking for a high-level description of how the app works.

The prompt here is as simple as “Explain this Forge app to me”.

Once you have a high-level understanding, you can dive deeper by asking more targeted questions.

Now that you know this is a custom field app, you can ask questions like: “How does a Custom Field app work, and what are all the components I need to consider? Explain it in the context of this app.” This helps you understand what’s required for a specific type of app.

If you prefer a visual explanation, generating a sequence diagram is simple. This allows you to clearly see the flow of the app—from its functions, through the front end and backend, all the way to the final output displayed to the user in Jira.

Apps enhancements planning and execution

Once you have a good understanding of the current state of the app—whether it’s a Hello World app created from a template or something more complex—you might want to make some changes. Even if you aren’t fully familiar with all of Forge’s capabilities, it’s easy to get started: simply ask a question describing what you want to achieve. For example, you could ask, “I want to display the external data somewhere else in Jira — what options are available?”

The Forge MCP Server responds with a list of Forge modules, along with additional information to help you make an informed decision.

Once you’ve chosen a module to add to your app, the code assistant can update the app for you, handling all the required dependencies automatically.

Make sure your code assistant is set up to actually update your app for you. For example, I use Copilot in VS Code. To have changes applied automatically (rather than just receiving suggestions), Copilot must be in either Agent or Edit mode. If it’s not, your requests may only result in code suggestions or explanations, not actual updates to your app.

With these enhancements in place, you’re ready to deploy and test your changes.

Help with troubleshooting

The changes have now been deployed and are available on your site—but what if something goes wrong? For example, the project page might not be displaying any data.

Suppose the URL used to load the data has changed and is now invalid. In this case, you can simply ask, “The external data isn’t loading in the Custom Field — can you help me troubleshoot it? Can we add some logs?” Your AI-powered IDE will then add contextual logging to assist with troubleshooting. But it doesn’t stop there—because the editor knows which log lines to expect, be sure to share back the log lines generated when using the app. Those logs are invaluable for getting to the root of the problem.

Pro-tips

To wrap it up, let me share my pro-tips after some time using it.

• When asking for knowledge, stop at high level or go as deep as you want.
• You can be specific or generic with your prompts. For example you can ask for the sequence diagram in ASCII art or skip that part and let your AI code assistant suggest an option and iterate on that.
• And most importantly: Iterate, iterate, iterate… don’t take the first answer as “good enough”. Keep going to get exactly what you want.

Ready to get started? Try out the Forge MCP Server today and see what you can build!

You can try it out by adding it Cursor, VS Code, Rovo Dev CLI or any tool supporting an MCP Server by following our Get started with the Forge MCP Server guide.