Discovery

The Rust SDK exposes public discovery helpers for finding announced servers and their published capabilities.

These functions query public announcement events so clients can find servers before opening a direct session.

What is discoverable

The current implementation supports:

• servers via discover_servers()
• tools via discover_tools()
• resources via discover_resources()
• prompts via discover_prompts()
• resource templates via discover_resource_templates()

When the rmcp feature is enabled, typed variants are also available for tools, resources, prompts, and resource templates.

Minimal example

This follows the repository discovery example.

use contextvm_sdk::discovery;
use contextvm_sdk::relay::RelayPool;
use contextvm_sdk::signer;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> contextvm_sdk::Result<()> {
    let keys = signer::generate();
    let relays = vec!["wss://relay.damus.io".to_string()];

    let relay_pool = RelayPool::new(keys).await?;
    relay_pool.connect(&relays).await?;
    let client = relay_pool.client();

    let servers = discovery::discover_servers(client, &relays).await?;
    for server in &servers {
        println!("server: {:?}", server.server_info.name);

        let tools = discovery::discover_tools(client, &server.pubkey_parsed, &relays).await?;
        println!("tools: {}", tools.len());
    }

    relay_pool.disconnect().await?;
    Ok(())
}

Discovery event model

The event kinds follow the public announcement model summarized in the repository root README:

• 11316: server announcement
• 11317: tools list
• 11318: resources list
• 11319: resource templates
• 11320: prompts list

These event kinds are the SDK’s public discovery model for server metadata and advertised MCP capabilities.

CEP-17 automatic relay resolution

Clients can discover which relays a server uses without hardcoding relay URLs. Set server_pubkey to an nprofile (which embeds relay hints) and leave relay_urls empty:

NostrClientTransportConfig::default()
    .with_server_pubkey("nprofile1...") // contains pubkey + relay hints

When start() is called with empty relay_urls, the transport runs a 6-stage resolution pipeline:

1. Configured relays — if relay_urls is non-empty, use them directly
2. nprofile hints — relay URLs embedded in the nprofile identity
3. CEP-17 discovery — fetch kind 10002 relay-list events from bootstrap relays
4. Fallback probing — probe fallback_operational_relay_urls in parallel with discovery
5. Sequential fallback — if the race winner returned empty, await the other
6. Bootstrap default — fall back to DEFAULT_BOOTSTRAP_RELAY_URLS as last resort

The discovery_relay_urls and fallback_operational_relay_urls config fields customize stages 3-4.

Important limitations

• discovery is public metadata, not a replacement for direct transport negotiation
• the current helpers fetch and parse latest public lists, but they do not replace direct session learning
• direct session learning still matters for encryption preferences, gift-wrap support, and first-message capability hints on an active connection

---

This page was ported from the ContextVM Rust SDK repository.