MCP Server

Give AI assistants native access to your help desk using the Model Context Protocol.

Open Help Desk includes a built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server mounted at /mcp/. MCP allows AI assistants — Claude, Cursor, VS Code with Continue, and others — to call help desk operations as structured tools, rather than trying to interact with the web UI.

With the MCP server connected, an AI assistant can:

• List open tickets and summarize them
• Look up the details and history of a specific ticket
• Create a ticket on behalf of a user
• Add a reply or internal note
• Change a ticket's status or assignee

The MCP server sits on top of the REST API — every operation goes through the same permission checks. An AI assistant using a Staff user's API key cannot do anything a Staff user couldn't do manually.

Available tools

list_tickets(status="New", priority="High", limit=10)

Connecting clients

Claude (claude.ai / Claude Code)

Add a server entry to your MCP configuration. In Claude Code, this lives in .claude/mcp.json (project-level) or ~/.claude/mcp.json (global).

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "helpdesk": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://helpdesk.example.com/mcp/",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer ohd_sk_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
      }
    }
  }
}

After saving, Claude will have access to the help desk tools in any conversation where MCP is active.

VS Code with Continue

// .continue/config.json
{
  "experimental": {
    "modelContextProtocolServers": [
      {
        "transport": {
          "type": "http",
          "url": "https://helpdesk.example.com/mcp/",
          "requestOptions": {
            "headers": {
              "Authorization": "Bearer ohd_sk_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
            }
          }
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Cursor

// cursor/mcp.json (in project root or ~/.cursor/mcp.json)
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "helpdesk": {
      "url": "https://helpdesk.example.com/mcp/",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer ohd_sk_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
      }
    }
  }
}

Any HTTP MCP client

The MCP server implements the standard Streamable HTTP transport. Point any compliant client at:

https://<BASE_URL>/mcp/

Include an Authorization header with either an API key or a JWT from the OAuth2 token endpoint.

Authentication

The MCP server uses the same authentication mechanisms as the REST API:

• API key (recommended for long-lived client configs) — Authorization: Bearer ohd_sk_...
• OAuth2 JWT (recommended for server-to-server) — obtain a token from POST /api/auth/token, include as Authorization: Bearer <jwt>. Tokens expire after 1 hour; your client must handle token refresh.

Session cookies are not accepted by the MCP server — they require a browser context.

Permissions

Every MCP tool call is subject to the same permission system as the REST API. The permissions granted depend on the role of the account whose credentials are used.

If a tool call fails a permission check, the MCP server returns a structured error response and does not execute the operation. The AI assistant receives a description of the error and can inform the user.