openbao-mcp 0.32.0

OpenBao Secrets Engine MCP Server for Agentic AI!

Openbao MCP

OpenBao Secrets and Encryption Key Vault orchestrator. Built with the highest architectural standards, incorporating dynamic facades, custom API routing, and FastMCP tool decoration.

Documentation — Installation, deployment, usage across the API, CLI, and MCP interfaces, and guidance for provisioning the OpenBao backend are maintained in the official documentation.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Features
• Installation
• Usage
• Configuration
• MCP Tools
• Architecture
• Deployment
• Contributing
• License

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Overview

Openbao MCP provides a high-performance, model-optimized interface to Openbao capabilities. It isolates the model from underlying API transport complexity, ensuring safe, idempotent, and highly traceable system interactions.

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Features

• Dynamic Facade Orchestration: Integrates multi-inheritance clients cleanly under a single facade.
• Battle-Tested Resilience: Out-of-the-box credential authentication, connection polling, and request retry strategies.
• FastMCP Declarative Tools: Fast, native schema registration with full inline validation.
• Complete Test Intent Diversity: Deep, automated unit, integration, and mock tests ensuring high code coverage.

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⚙️ Dynamic Tool Selection & Visibility

This MCP server supports dynamic toolset selection and visibility filtering at runtime. This allows you to restrict the set of exposed tools in order to prevent blowing up the LLM's context window.

You can configure tool filtering via multiple input channels:

• CLI Arguments: Pass --tools or --toolsets (or their disabled counterparts --disabled-tools and --disabled-toolsets) during startup.
• Environment Variables: Define standard environment variables:
  • MCP_ENABLED_TOOLS / MCP_DISABLED_TOOLS
  • MCP_ENABLED_TAGS / MCP_DISABLED_TAGS
• HTTP SSE Request Headers: Pass custom headers during transport initialization:
  • x-mcp-enabled-tools / x-mcp-disabled-tools
  • x-mcp-enabled-tags / x-mcp-disabled-tags
• HTTP SSE Request Query Parameters: Append query parameters directly to your transport connection URL:
  • ?tools=tool1,tool2
  • ?tags=tag1

When query strings or parameters are supplied, an LLM-free Knowledge Graph resolution layer (using DynamicToolOrchestrator) matches query intents against known tool tags, names, or descriptions, with safe fallback and automated 24-hour background cache refreshing.

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Installation

Install in editable mode directly inside your active workspace:

pip install -e .[all]

Or via the uv tool:

uv pip install -e .

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Usage

You can launch the FastMCP server in stdio mode via Python module execution:

import asyncio
from openbao_mcp.mcp_server import get_mcp_instance

async def main():
    mcp = get_mcp_instance()
    # Execute stdio loop or launch server
    print("MCP Server ready.")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

For direct shell launch, execute:

python -m openbao_mcp.mcp_server

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Configuration

The package is fully configurable via the environment variables listed below:

Variable	Description	Default	Required
OPENBAO_URL	The primary URL of the OpenBao server.	http://127.0.0.1:8200	Yes
OPENBAO_TOKEN	Root or service account access token.	bao_root_token	Yes
BAO_ADDR	Alias/fallback for the OpenBao server address.	None	No
VAULT_ADDR	Alias/fallback for the OpenBao/Vault server address.	None	No
OPENBAO_MCP_BASE_URL	Alternative fallback URL for user-level client endpoints.	http://127.0.0.1:8200	No
OPENBAO_MCP_USERNAME	Username for username/password authentication methods.	None	No
OPENBAO_MCP_PASSWORD	Password for username/password authentication methods.	None	No
OPENBAO_MCP_SSL_VERIFY	Enable/disable SSL/TLS certificate verification (True/False).	True	No
SECRETSTOOL	Enable/disable Secrets Engine MCP tools namespace.	True	No
SYSTOOL	Enable/disable System Administration MCP tools namespace.	True	No
AUTHTOOL	Enable/disable Authentication Engine MCP tools namespace.	True	No
SSHTOOL	Enable/disable SSH Management MCP tools namespace.	True	No

A local template is supplied inside .env.example. Copy this file as .env and fill out your specific service endpoint parameters before starting execution.

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MCP Tools

The following declarative FastMCP tools are registered and available to upstream AI agents:

Tool Name	Description	Parameters
read_secret	Retrieve secret from Vault KV engine	path: str
write_secret	Write secret to Vault KV engine	path: str, data: dict
get_health	Get OpenBao system health status	None

See docs/overview.md or docs/concepts.md for deeper operational examples.

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Architecture

This package uses the standardized Agent-Utilities dynamic facade architecture:

graph TD
    User([User Agent]) --> Server[FastMCP Server]
    Server --> Facade[Api Dynamic Facade]
    Facade --> ClientBase[ApiClientBase]
    Facade --> Auth[Credentials Auth Handler]
    ClientBase --> Service([External Service API])

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Deployment

Bare-Metal (Standard pip)

1. Set up your Python virtual environment (>= 3.10).
2. Install the package: pip install .[all]
3. Export credentials:

   export OPENBAO_URL="http://127.0.0.1:8200"
   

4. Run: python -m openbao_mcp.mcp_server

Container (Docker Compose)

A standard compose structure is provided inside the docker/ folder. Build and deploy:

docker compose -f docker/compose.yml up --build -d

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Additional Deployment Options

openbao-mcp can also run as a local container (Docker / Podman / uv) or be consumed from a remote deployment. The Deployment guide has full, copy-paste mcp_config.json for all four transports — stdio, streamable-http, local container / uv, and remote URL:

• Local container / uv — launch the server from mcp_config.json via uvx, docker run, or podman run, or point at a local streamable-http container by url.
• Remote URL — connect to a server deployed behind Caddy at http://openbao-mcp.arpa/mcp using the "url" key.

Documentation

The complete documentation is published as the official documentation site and is the recommended reference for installation, deployment, and day-to-day operation.

Page	Contents
Installation	pip, source, extras, prebuilt Docker image
Deployment	run the MCP server, the agent server, Compose, Caddy + Technitium, env config
Usage	the MCP tools, the Api client, example prompts
Backing Platform	deploy OpenBao with Docker
Overview	architecture and the dynamic facade
Concepts	concept registry (CONCEPT:BAO-*)

AGENTS.md is the canonical contributor/agent guidance.

Contributing

Please audit all code changes against ecosystem guidelines in CONTRIBUTING.md if available, and run:

pre-commit run --all-files

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License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for complete details.