MCP

Lific exposes MCP tools for issues, projects, resources, pages, plans, comments, search, and activity history. The server is part of the Lific binary. Lific stores its data in SQLite.

This page documents the endpoint and its authentication for manual setup. Connect agents documents lific connect, which detects installed AI tools and writes this configuration for you.

HTTP endpoint

The MCP endpoint is:

https://your-server.example/mcp

The endpoint uses Streamable HTTP. The server is configured for JSON responses. It is not a standalone SSE endpoint.

API key authentication

HTTP clients authenticate with a bearer API key in the Authorization header. Create a key on the server with lific key create --name <NAME>. Lific returns the plaintext key once when it creates the key.

Use a configuration shaped like the following. Client-specific field names can differ.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lific": {
      "url": "https://your-server.example/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer lific_sk-live-your-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

OAuth 2.1 authentication

Lific supports OAuth 2.1 for the MCP endpoint. The protected-resource metadata is available at /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/mcp. Authorization-server metadata is available at /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server.

OAuth-capable MCP clients can connect to the endpoint URL and complete the authorization flow without a manually created API key. Lific supports authorization-code flow with S256 PKCE. It also supports device authorization.

Lific implements dynamic client registration at /oauth/register. Clients can register a redirect URI before starting authorization. Registered redirect URIs must be absolute HTTP or HTTPS URLs.

Both grants are approved from a signed-in browser, and only from one: an OAuth access token cannot approve an authorization request or a device code. The browser session must also have signed in within the last 15 minutes, because approving a connection mints a 30-day credential for the tool.

An older session is refused, and the refusal is not resumed for you. Nothing is created. To continue: sign out of Lific (revisiting the login page does not help, since the old session is still valid, just old), sign back in, then start the connection again from your MCP client. On an instance that signs in without a password, signing out and reloading is enough. Approval binds the grant to a per-tool bot owned by the approving human, and the token exchange is refused unless the grant names an identity that may still authenticate. A grant that names nobody, which only pre-2.1 rows do, returns invalid_grant; so does one whose bot was deleted, whose owner was deactivated, or whose owner ran an account recovery between approval and exchange.

Identity and authorization

MCP resolves the caller exactly as REST does, in every auth mode. An agent cannot do more through MCP than the same account can do through the web UI, and the gates read the same resolved identity on both surfaces.

Writes made by a connected agent are attributed to that agent in the audit log, not to the operator who connected it. lific connect mints a per-tool bot for this, so a tool acts as itself and inherits its owner's project access.

stdio sessions and LIFIC_TOKEN

A stdio MCP session has no transport authentication, so it carries its identity in the LIFIC_TOKEN environment variable instead. LIFIC_TOKEN is an API key. lific connect --stdio writes that variable into the client's configuration entry.

Lific checks it at startup:

• Absent, or valid but not bound to a user: the session runs as the operator and Lific prints a warning to standard error.
• Present and valid: the session runs as that agent.
• Present but invalid, for example revoked or mistyped: Lific refuses to start. A bad agent credential must not silently fall back to operator access.

Revocation takes effect at the next tool call

The startup check is a fail-fast, not the enforcement point. A stdio session can run for days, so Lific revalidates LIFIC_TOKEN before every tool call and resolves the caller's identity from that check. Revoking the key, changing the owner's password, signing out everywhere, or deactivating the account stops the agent at its next tool call, and the tool body never runs, so nothing is written.

The refusal comes back as a failed tool result (isError: true) rather than a JSON-RPC protocol error, because the request was well formed and the session is still usable: the agent reads the text, which tells it to run lific connect and restart the MCP server. The text does not say why the credential failed; that goes to the server's log.

A session launched with no LIFIC_TOKEN has no credential to revalidate and keeps its operator behavior.

LIFIC_TOKEN is not the same thing as LIFIC_API_KEY. LIFIC_API_KEY is the bearer credential for remote HTTP access.

MCP Registry manifest and stdio

The repository includes an MCP Registry manifest in server.json. The manifest declares the Cargo package lific and a stdio launch command of lific mcp. This manifest describes the stdio package transport. It does not configure the HTTP endpoint.

Registry publication is controlled by the registry that consumes the manifest.