MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol server, hosted as an ordinary Launchpad app. It exposes a folder of Markdown runbooks to an assistant as three tools — list_notes, search_notes, read_note — and the notes shipped here are samples you are meant to delete.

The point of the example is not the notes. It is that a remote MCP server needs nothing special from this platform: MCP's streamable-http transport is an HTTP server, and an HTTP server is what Launchpad hosts.

What the platform supplies, so the app does not

	Who does it
Authentication	The gateway. No credential, no request — the app never sees one.
Authorization	The gateway, against the app's visibility and the caller.
TLS and the public name	The install's front door.
Streaming	The proxy forwards without buffering, which is what SSE responses need.
Staying awake	An open stream counts as activity, so nothing is reaped mid-call.

There is no auth block in app.py and no token in the environment. That is the design, not an omission: the platform already answers "who may call this", and a second answer inside the app is the one that goes stale when somebody is locked out.

Connecting a client

Deploy the app, then create a key on its Settings → API keys tab. The endpoint is the app's URL with /mcp on the end — open the app in a browser and the page tells you the exact URL, worked out from the request rather than from anything you have to keep in step with the slug.

claude mcp add --transport http runbooks \
  https://launchpad.example.com/apps/<slug>/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer lp_your_key_here"

Any client that can send a static header works the same way. A client that insists on OAuth does not: Launchpad authenticates with keys, and MCP's OAuth flow wants an authorization server this platform does not run.

Two kinds of key behave differently, and the difference is worth knowing before you hand one out:

• App key (lp_…) — possession is the authorization. It reaches this app and nothing else, and it outlives whoever created it. This is the one for a shared assistant.
• Personal key (lpu_…) — is a person. It authenticates its owner, who is then authorized normally, and it dies with their account.

Configuration

Variable	Required	Default	Meaning
NOTES_DIR	no	notes	The folder read by the tools.
SERVER_NAME	no	Runbooks	What the server calls itself to a client.
ALLOWED_HOSTS	no	(empty)	Comma-separated Host allowlist. See below.
ALLOWED_ORIGINS	no	(empty)	Comma-separated Origin allowlist. See below.

PORT, HOST and BASE_PATH come from the platform. This is Launchpad's generic Python path — a requirements.txt naming no framework the platform recognises, started as python app.py — so the app binds what it is told to bind. An MCP server wants to own its server anyway.

A word about the Python version

The MCP SDK needs Python 3.10 or newer, which is younger than the system Python on a good many servers. The .python-version file in this repo is what handles that: uv reads it when the platform creates the virtual environment and fetches the interpreter if the box does not have it. Delete the file only if you know the build machine's Python is new enough — the failure otherwise arrives as a dependency-resolution error in the build log, which is a puzzling way to be told your Python is old.

About those two allowlists

The SDK ships DNS-rebinding protection: a Host and Origin check meant for a server a browser can reach directly on loopback. Behind this platform it is off unless you set one of the variables, because the proxy rewrites Host to the address it dialled — an address the app cannot predict in isolated mode, where the workload is a pod rather than a port on the same machine. Enforcing a list it cannot compute would produce a 421 with no correct value to write.

Nothing is given up by default: the gateway runs its own Origin allowlist and its own authorization in front of every request. Set the variables if you want the app's own belt as well as the platform's braces.

Making it yours

app.py reads Markdown from a folder. Replace the three tool bodies with queries against whatever your team actually has — a ticket system, a warehouse, an internal API — and the transport, the auth story and the hosting are unchanged. Keep the shape of what is here:

• Flat parameters and plain return types. A small, strictly typed tool surface is what a modest local model can call correctly, and an air-gapped install is often running one.
• Say when an answer was cut short. search_notes returns truncated rather than letting a caller infer completeness from a count that happens to equal the limit.
• Resolve every path and check it is inside the folder. .. is the obvious case; a symlink pointing out is the one that gets forgotten.

Local development

uv venv venv && uv pip install -r requirements.txt --python venv/bin/python
PORT=8000 venv/bin/python app.py

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8000/ for the endpoint page, or point a client straight at http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp. No key is needed locally — the credential belongs to the gateway, and there is no gateway in front of a process you started yourself.