litellm-algenta

Docs: docs.algenta.ai · All integrations

LiteLLM MCP Gateway integration for Algenta: config templates, a config generator/linter, and a real-proxy conformance test suite that map contracts/integration-tool-contract.json's tool-profile boundary onto LiteLLM's real mcp_servers: gateway config, pointed at your own self-hosted Algenta engine.

This package is not shaped like its pydantic-ai-algenta / langchain-algenta / algenta-tools (Vercel AI SDK) siblings, on purpose. LiteLLM's MCP Gateway (litellm --config config.yaml) is a proxy/gateway server process configured by YAML -- there is no AlgentaToolset object, no create_algenta_tools function, no in-process wrapper to call. What this package ships instead:

• litellm_algenta.config.build_mcp_server_entry -- generates a real mcp_servers: entry for your own self-hosted Algenta engine, with contracts/integration-tool-contract.json's four profiles mapped onto LiteLLM's real, call-time-enforced allowed_tools (and, for execute_decision, allowed_params).
• litellm_algenta.config.lint_mcp_server_entry / assert_safe -- catch an unsafe config (missing the force/override_safety argument scrub, an Algenta-hosted URL, a malformed oauth2 block) before a litellm process ever starts, whether or not you built it with this package's own generator.
• configs/ -- ready-to-use YAML templates, one per profile, plus an OAuth2 (client_credentials) example -- see Config templates.
• A real-proxy conformance test suite (tests/) that starts a real litellm proxy process against a real stub Algenta MCP server and asserts against the gateway's actual HTTP behavior -- see Testing this package.

Prerequisites

• A self-hosted Algenta engine, already running and reachable. This package only generates and validates a config fragment that points at it -- it never runs an engine for you, and it never talks to any Algenta-operated service. There is no Algenta-hosted API and no Algenta account to sign up for.
• That engine's MCP endpoint URL and bearer credential (or OAuth2 client credentials, if your engine uses those instead) -- set as environment variables, never as literal values in a config file (see Self-hosted-first below).
• Python 3.12+.
• litellm[proxy], installed separately, only once you're ready to actually run the gateway (see Install below) -- generating and linting a config needs nothing but this package itself.

Install

pip install litellm-algenta

This package's own runtime code depends on nothing but pyyaml -- not litellm itself, and not algenta-sdk (see Why no algenta-sdk dependency below). build_mcp_server_entry/render_yaml work standalone, e.g. to generate a config fragment for a litellm process that runs somewhere else entirely (a different host, a managed LiteLLM deployment). Running the gateway yourself needs litellm[proxy] separately:

pip install 'litellm[proxy]'

This one pulls in LiteLLM's full proxy-server dependency tree (the proxy server itself, database clients, and other packages the gateway process needs) -- several hundred MB and a minute or more to install, not a mistake or a hang.

Self-hosted-first

Every config this package generates points at your own self-hosted Algenta engine, resolved at litellm proxy startup time from an environment variable (ALGENTA_MCP_URL by default) -- never a literal, hardcoded, or Algenta-hosted endpoint. lint_mcp_server_entry flags a URL that looks Algenta-hosted (algenta.ai) even in a config you wrote by hand.

Quick start

from pathlib import Path
from litellm_algenta.config import build_mcp_server_entry, merge_into_config_file

fragment = build_mcp_server_entry(
    profile="observe",              # default; see Tool profiles below
    server_name="algenta",
    base_url_env_var="ALGENTA_MCP_URL",       # litellm resolves os.environ/ALGENTA_MCP_URL at startup
    authentication_token_env_var="ALGENTA_MCP_TOKEN",
)
merge_into_config_file(Path("config.yaml"), fragment)  # idempotent -- re-run-safe

export ALGENTA_MCP_URL="http://localhost:8000/mcp"     # your own self-hosted engine
export ALGENTA_MCP_TOKEN="..."                          # your own engine's bearer credential
litellm --config config.yaml --port 4000

Or skip the Python API and start from a checked-in template directly:

cp configs/observe.yaml config.yaml   # or govern.yaml / execute.yaml / full.yaml
export ALGENTA_MCP_URL="http://localhost:8000/mcp"
export ALGENTA_MCP_TOKEN="..."
litellm --config config.yaml --port 4000

Or use the bundled command-line interface, which does the same thing as the Python snippet above without writing any Python:

python -m litellm_algenta.config --profile observe --server-name algenta --merge-into config.yaml

merged mcp_servers.algenta (observe profile) into config.yaml

Leave off --merge-into to print the generated YAML to stdout instead of writing it to a file, or run python -m litellm_algenta.config --help for the full flag list (--base-url-env-var, --auth-type, --token-env-var, --no-lint).

Either way, once the gateway is running, a caller talks to it exactly like any other MCP server -- over the native aggregate /mcp endpoint (tool names get the server name prefixed, e.g. algenta-query_data) or LiteLLM's own REST convenience API (GET /mcp-rest/tools/list, POST /mcp-rest/tools/call) -- this package does not sit on that call path at all once the gateway is configured; there is nothing left for it to do at request time.

Try it locally (no engine, no LLM provider key required)

Don't have a self-hosted Algenta engine running yet? examples/try_it_locally.py is the closest thing to a zero-setup demo. It starts a real litellm proxy in front of a real (but fake-data) stub Algenta MCP server -- the same fixtures this package's own test suite uses (tests/stub_server.py, tests/proxy_fixture.py) -- and drives both over real HTTP, so you can see the profile enforcement actually work before you have an engine or an LLM provider key:

cd python
uv sync --all-packages --all-extras   # installs the dev extras: litellm[proxy], fastmcp, httpx
uv run python litellm-algenta/examples/try_it_locally.py

Real output (trimmed):

Tools visible under the 'observe' profile: ['get_contract', 'query_data', 'recommend', 'simulate']
query_data(dataset='demo') -> {"dataset": "demo", "rows": [{"value": 1}, {"value": 2}]}
Calling execute_decision anyway (bypassing the filtered tool list) -> HTTP 403 (refused by the gateway itself, not this package)

It stops there -- there is no real engine or LLM in this loop, so it cannot run an actual chat completion. Point ALGENTA_MCP_URL at your own running engine (Quick start, above) to go further.

Tool profiles

Profile	allowed_tools	Notes
observe (default)	get_contract, query_data, simulate, recommend	Read-only.
govern	+ plan_decision, log_decision	Propose/record decisions; never executes.
execute	+ execute_decision	Real-world execution; allowed_params restricts its arguments (see below).
full	(key omitted -- LiteLLM's own meaning of "unrestricted")	Opt-in only; admin/ops tooling; still gets the allowed_params scrub.

build_mcp_server_entry(profile="execute", server_name="algenta")

Config templates

configs/ has one ready-to-use fragment per profile (observe.yaml/govern.yaml/execute.yaml/full.yaml), plus observe.oauth2-client-credentials.yaml demonstrating the OAuth2 machine-to-machine auth type. Every one of them is generated by scripts/render_configs.py calling build_mcp_server_entry/render_yaml directly -- tests/test_configs_up_to_date.py fails CI if they ever drift from what those functions currently produce, so they're never hand-edited out of sync with the code that generates them.

How this maps onto LiteLLM's real gateway enforcement

Everything below is verified against a real running litellm --config ... proxy (1.98.0) -- source-cited in litellm_algenta/config.py's module docstring, and re-checked as an executable test in tests/test_gateway_conformance.py -- not assumed from documentation.

allowed_tools is a real, call-time 403 gate, not just a discovery-listing filter. Calling a tool outside a server's allowed_tools is refused by the gateway itself (MCPServerManager.check_allowed_or_banned_tools) even if a caller bypasses the filtered tools/list response entirely. This package uses it as the primary mechanism for profile enforcement -- materially stronger than a client-side scrub, and it satisfies the contract's own requirement that execute-tier gating be enforced server-side, not by the calling application.

allowed_params.execute_decision is a real, call-time 403 gate on arguments. Confirmed by reading MCPServerManager.validate_allowed_params (called before the upstream request is ever made) and by a live proxy run: an execute_decision call carrying force: true against a server configured with allowed_params: {execute_decision: ["decision_id", "webhook_url", "timeout_seconds", "metadata"]} gets a real 403 -- the argument never reaches the upstream engine. build_mcp_server_entry sets this unconditionally on every profile under which execute_decision is reachable, including full -- the contract's never_model_facing_note says force/override_safety may never be model-reachable "in ANY profile, ever," and full's opt-in breadth doesn't get an exception from that one rule.

os.environ/VAR_NAME genuinely resolves for mcp_servers: fields, including url and authentication_token -- confirmed live: a config carrying authentication_token: "os.environ/ALGENTA_MCP_TOKEN" reaches the upstream engine as Authorization: Bearer <the real env var's value>, and the caller's own gateway-facing master key never reaches the upstream at all.

What LiteLLM's gateway config genuinely CANNOT enforce -- said plainly

• It cannot strip force/override_safety from the advertised JSON Schema. allowed_params gates arguments actually sent, not what tools/list shows as available on execute_decision's schema -- confirmed by reading the discovery code path, which never consults allowed_params at all. If your connected Algenta engine's own MCP tool registry advertises force on execute_decision's schema (the contract says it may, for operator/break-glass use), a model talking through this gateway will still see force listed as a settable parameter -- it just cannot make that argument take effect, because allowed_params 403s the call before it reaches the engine. Getting the schema itself clean is the connected engine's job (serve a model-facing schema that never advertises these fields), not something any mcp_servers: config key can do -- unlike pydantic-ai-algenta / langchain-algenta, which strip the schema themselves because their frameworks hand them the schema to edit before the model ever sees it. A LiteLLM-fronted deployment doesn't have that seam; this package does not pretend otherwise.
• There is no approval-pause primitive, and the real tool never needs one. execute_decision is synchronous: a call either comes back 200 with a real ExecutionReceipt (decision_id/webhook_url/execution_status/response_code/executed_at/ policy_snapshot_id/schema_snapshot_id/manifest_version/payload_summary/ safety_overridden) or is refused outright, in that same call, with exactly one of three real named gates -- "idempotency" (bypassable only via force=true, for one re-execution), "confidence", or "risk_floor" (both bypassable only via override_safety=true). There is no pending/rejected/expired state to come back and poll later -- a denial and a receipt are both final, in the same call that produced them. A JSON-RPC tools/call result carries no HTTP status of its own, so the only way that denial can reach a caller over MCP is the same way any other tool-body exception does: isError: true, with the gate name/code/message/override_hint inside the result content -- confirmed to pass through this gateway completely unchanged, exactly like the already-verified static-credential-401 case above (see tests/test_gateway_conformance.py::test_execute_decision_gate_denial_surfaces_as_iserror). A successful receipt passes through just as unchanged, isError: false. There is no LiteLLM-native equivalent of pydantic_ai_algenta's ApprovalRequired or langchain_algenta's interrupt()-based pause, and this tool never has anything for one of those to pause on. Whatever built the chat-completion request that triggered the tool call is entirely on its own to notice isError and read the result -- there is no config key, callback, or webhook this package could wire up that would change that, because the gateway is receipt-blind by design (it has no opinion on what's inside a tool's JSON result).
• Response headers do not round-trip. extra_headers (see below) forwards a caller-sent header to the upstream engine, one direction only -- the gateway's own HTTP response back to the caller never carries anything the upstream returned as a response header. Any upstream signal that needs to reach the caller has to travel inside the JSON receipt body instead -- correlate by the receipt's own decision_id echo-back.

Trace headers

extra_headers: ["x-trace-id"] (the default build_mcp_server_entry sets) forwards that header from the model-calling client to the upstream Algenta engine, verbatim -- real and verified, not just documented (tests/test_gateway_conformance.py's trace-header assertions). Without it configured, the header is silently dropped, never reaching the upstream at all -- also verified, in the same test, against a second server entry with extra_headers=().

Auth types and token-expiry behavior

auth_type on an mcp_servers.<name> entry controls how the gateway authenticates to your upstream engine -- a completely separate plane from general_settings.master_key / virtual keys, which control how callers authenticate to the gateway.

auth_type	What happens on a mid-session upstream 401
bearer_token / api_key / basic / token (static credential)	Swallowed into an MCP isError: true result carrying the raw stringified exception. No retry, no reauth -- verified live (tests/test_gateway_conformance.py::test_static_bearer_token_401_becomes_iserror_without_retry). The gateway's own outer HTTP status stays 200 either way; a caller has to notice isError: true and parse the exception string itself.
oauth2 (client_credentials or authorization_code) / oauth2_token_exchange / oauth2_id_jag	LiteLLM mints/refreshes the upstream token itself; a real invalidate-and-retry-once path exists in source for the token-exchange/OBO modes (not independently reproduced end-to-end here -- it needs a real token-exchange IdP to stand up). oauth2 requires an explicit oauth2_flow; build_mcp_server_entry raises ConfigError if you omit it, matching a real litellm proxy startup crash with the identical requirement (tests/test_gateway_conformance.py::test_oauth2_without_flow_fails_fast_at_proxy_startup reproduces that crash directly, independent of this package's own pre-check).
true_passthrough / oauth_delegate	Forwards the caller's own upstream OAuth token unchanged -- LiteLLM mints nothing. The only mode where a 401 is relayed to the caller as a clean, real 401 + WWW-Authenticate instead of being swallowed, so the caller's own MCP client can redo its OAuth flow.

Use a static credential only for an engine behind a token you rotate out-of-band and are prepared to have swallow silently on expiry; use oauth2/oauth2_token_exchange/true_passthrough if you need a clean, retryable failure signal on expiry instead.

Why no algenta-sdk dependency?

Every other package in this repository may depend on at most one Algenta-owned thing: algenta-sdk, a thin HTTP/gRPC client. This package depends on it for nothing, because there's nothing here that would call it: algenta-sdk's own DEFAULT_BASE_URL/MCP_ENDPOINT constants point at Algenta's hosted cloud, the opposite of this repository's self-hosted-only default (see the typescript/algenta-tools sibling's README for the identical reasoning, reaching the identical conclusion) -- and beyond those constants, algenta-sdk has nothing this package's job (generating and linting a YAML config fragment) would use at all. Declaring it as an unused, leftover-placeholder dependency was exactly the bug an earlier package's adversarial review caught and fixed; this package simply never adds it.

Why config generation instead of a Python wrapper class/function?

Because there is nothing to wrap. pydantic-ai-algenta wraps pydantic_ai.mcp.MCPToolset; langchain-algenta wraps langchain_mcp_adapters.client.MultiServerMCPClient; algenta-tools (Vercel AI SDK) wraps @ai-sdk/mcp. All three sit between the model-calling framework and the MCP transport, in the same process as the agent. LiteLLM's MCP Gateway sits outside every process that calls it -- it's what those frameworks (or any HTTP client) would call through, not a library any of them import. The honest shape of "integrating a proxy" is generating and validating the proxy's own config, and testing that config against the real proxy -- not inventing a Python class this architecture has no room for.

Why a linter that runs on hand-written configs too?

lint_mcp_server_entry/assert_safe don't require you to have built your config with build_mcp_server_entry -- they take any {"mcp_servers": {...}}-shaped dict. An operator who starts from configs/full.yaml and then hand-adds a second server, or edits allowed_tools back open on an existing one, can still run the linter against the result before starting litellm. The one rule this package treats as non-negotiable regardless of how a config was produced -- execute_decision, wherever it's reachable, must have a matching allowed_params scrub that excludes force/override_safety -- is enforced by re-deriving it from the config's own shape every time, not by trusting that whoever wrote the config used this package's generator.

Testing this package

The conformance suite (tests/test_gateway_conformance.py) starts a real litellm proxy subprocess (via the litellm console script installed by the dev extra's litellm[proxy]) against a real stub Algenta MCP server (tests/stub_server.py, a real fastmcp.FastMCP server on a real HTTP socket) and drives it over real HTTP, asserting against the gateway's actual /mcp-rest/tools/list / /mcp-rest/tools/call responses -- never a mocked litellm and never a mocked upstream. This is structurally heavier than the pydantic-ai-algenta / langchain-algenta siblings' test suites (they exercise their own in-process wrapper code against a stub; this package has no in-process wrapper, so its tests spawn the real external gateway process too) -- proxy startup takes a few seconds per test that needs one, budgeted into three test functions rather than one-fixture-per-assertion.

cd python
uv sync --all-packages --all-extras
uv run pytest litellm-algenta -v

tests/test_config_builder.py and tests/test_configs_up_to_date.py are pure unit tests (no subprocess, no network) covering config.py's own generation/lint/merge logic; tests/test_contract_parity.py loads the real contracts/integration-tool-contract.json from disk (skipped, not failed, outside a repo checkout) and asserts this package's embedded contract.py constants agree with it byte-for-byte on every tool-name set.