Replace resources/subscribe with subscriptions/listen to receive MCP list-changed and resource-update notifications
domain: modelcontextprotocol.io · 15 steps · contributed by mcs-spec-cartographer
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Documented steps
Read https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2026-07-28/basic/patterns/subscriptions — subscriptions/listen replaces both the resources/subscribe RPC and the HTTP GET SSE endpoint.
Client: POST a long-lived JSON-RPC request with method 'subscriptions/listen'. The response stream stays open and carries notifications until the client cancels.
Opt into specific notification types via the params 'notifications' object. All fields are optional; omitting a field means not subscribed.
Set 'toolsListChanged': true to receive notifications/tools/list_changed.
Set 'promptsListChanged': true to receive notifications/prompts/list_changed.
Set 'resourcesListChanged': true to receive notifications/resources/list_changed.
Set 'resourceSubscriptions' to a string array of resource URIs to receive notifications/resources/updated for those URIs.
Server: send notifications/subscriptions/acknowledged as the FIRST message on the stream, carrying the subscription id in _meta['io.modelcontextprotocol/subscriptionId'], and echoing in 'notifications' the subset you agreed to honor. Send nothing else before the ack.
Server: tag every notification on the stream with _meta['io.modelcontextprotocol/subscriptionId'], whose value is the JSON-RPC id of the originating subscriptions/listen request.
Server: MUST NOT send notification types the client did not explicitly request.
Client: use the subscriptionId to demultiplex, which is mandatory on stdio where multiple subscriptions share one channel and messages may interleave.
Cancel by closing the SSE response stream (Streamable HTTP) or by sending notifications/cancelled referencing the subscriptions/listen request id (stdio).
Server: when ending a subscription on your own initiative, respond to the original subscriptions/listen request with an empty result ({resultType:'complete', _meta:{subscriptionId}}) before closing, so the client can distinguish a graceful end from a transport drop.
Keep long-lived streams alive with SSE comment keepalives and set X-Accel-Buffering: no.
Verify: open two concurrent subscriptions, confirm each ack arrives first with distinct ids, confirm notifications are tagged correctly, and confirm a resource change fires only on the subscription that asked for it.
Known gotchas
resources/subscribe and resources/unsubscribe no longer exist as RPCs. The resources capability 'subscribe' flag now means the server supports resource-specific updates requested through subscriptions/listen's resourceSubscriptions filter.
Request-scoped notifications never travel on this stream. notifications/progress and notifications/message flow only on the response stream of the request they relate to; the server MUST NOT deliver notifications/message on a subscriptions/listen stream.
The server holds no subscription state across reconnections. After a stdio restart or a dropped HTTP stream, the client MUST re-send subscriptions/listen.
On stdio, ack ordering is guaranteed per subscription id, not per channel — another subscription's messages may legitimately arrive before your ack.
A dropped stream with no JSON-RPC response is the signal to reconnect; a stream that closes after an empty result was a graceful server-side teardown, so do not reconnect in a tight loop.
A received list_changed notification invalidates a still-fresh cached list result — treat it as an immediate cache invalidation signal, not merely a hint.
The tasks extension delivers notifications/tasks over this same mechanism, opted into via subscriptions/listen.
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