Rentman MCP Server

A small remote MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that gives ChatGPT and Claude direct, live access to our Rentman account — projects, equipment, contacts, crew, and any other Rentman resource — without the endpoint cap, CSV lookup table, or pagination bugs the old Custom GPT had.

Once deployed, every AE adds this as a custom connector in ChatGPT or Claude Desktop (one URL, pasted once) and can just ask things like "what equipment is booked on the 47G Summit" in plain English.

Tested end-to-end against the live Rentman API before handoff — see "What was tested" below.

Tools it exposes

• rentman_search_projects — free-text project search (client-side scan, since Rentman's API has no text-search filter), or exact lookup by project number / customer id / location id.
• rentman_project_details — full project info with customer/venue/contacts/account manager resolved to real names (replaces the static CSV mapping file).
• rentman_project_equipment — every equipment line on a project, grouped and paginated automatically.
• rentman_get — fetch any single record by resource + id (e.g. contacts, crew, costs).
• rentman_query — generic filtered list against any Rentman resource, for anything not covered by the tools above.

Deploying

Push this folder to a GitHub repo first (private is fine) — both options below deploy from that repo. The server is written to work either way: it's stateless per-request (a fresh MCP session on every call, no in-memory state kept between requests), so it runs equally well as a long-lived process or as a serverless function.

Option A — Vercel

1. Import the GitHub repo in Vercel (New Project → pick the repo).
2. Vercel auto-detects api/index.js as a serverless function — no build config needed.
3. Project Settings → Environment Variables: add RENTMAN_TOKEN and MCP_SHARED_SECRET.
4. Deploy. Vercel gives you a URL like https://rentman-mcp.vercel.app.
5. Your connector URL is: https://rentman-mcp.vercel.app/mcp?key=<MCP_SHARED_SECRET>

vercel.json rewrites every path to api/index.js, so /mcp and /health both work normally even though Vercel only auto-routes /api/* by default. Cold starts are typically ~1s, much faster than Render's free tier.

Option B — Render (free tier)

1. In Render: New → Web Service, connect the same GitHub repo.
2. Build command: npm install. Start command: npm start (runs server.js, a normal always-on Node process — not the api/ serverless entry point Vercel uses).
3. Environment tab: add RENTMAN_TOKEN and MCP_SHARED_SECRET.
4. Deploy. Render gives you a URL like https://rentman-mcp.onrender.com.
5. Your connector URL is: https://rentman-mcp.onrender.com/mcp?key=<MCP_SHARED_SECRET>

Render's free tier spins the service down after inactivity, so the first request after a while will be slow (~30s cold start) — Vercel doesn't have this problem, which makes it the better default choice for this project.

Local dev

npm install
cp .env.example .env   # fill in RENTMAN_TOKEN and MCP_SHARED_SECRET
npm start               # runs server.js on http://localhost:3000

Connecting from ChatGPT

Settings → Apps → enable Developer Mode → Add custom connector → paste the connector URL above.

Connecting from Claude Desktop

Customize → Connectors → "+" → Add custom connector → paste the connector URL above.

Security notes

• The Rentman token lives only in the server's environment variables — it's never sent to or stored by any AE's device.
• The key query param is a shared secret gate so random people who find the URL can't query our Rentman data. Treat the connector URL itself as sensitive (don't post it in public channels).
• If the Rentman token needs to be rotated, update the RENTMAN_TOKEN env var on the host — no code change needed.

What was tested before handoff

Ran locally against the live Rentman API (intheevent account):

• MCP initialize handshake
• Auth rejection when the shared-secret key is missing
• tools/list — all 5 tools register correctly
• rentman_search_projects — found "2026 47G Zero Gravity Summit @ Salt Palace Convention Center" (project 5616) as the most recent 47G match, matching manual verification
• rentman_project_details — resolved customer/venue/contacts/account manager to real names
• rentman_project_equipment — returned all 22 equipment groups / 447 line items for project 5616, matching a manual pull done earlier in this project

One real Rentman API quirk found and worked around: cursor-based pagination (next_page_url) silently stops working when a sort param is combined with limit=300 — it returns null after the first page even though more results exist. The search tool uses offset-based paging instead, which does work correctly.