Connect

MCP

Connect external MCP servers so agents can call their tools.

AIOS ships an MCP client — it connects out to third-party MCP servers and exposes their tools to your agents. It does not run an MCP server of its own for external callers.

Web UI → MCP

MCP page, add-server form

Lists every server configured under mcp_servers in ~/.aios/config.yaml: name, transport, enabled/disabled, the command or URL, and how many of its tools are in use (all, or a filtered count). Config changes here take effect the next time the agent starts — a running backend already connected its servers at boot.

Pick a transport

Stdio (spawn a local command), Streamable HTTP, or legacy SSE.

Fill in the fields

Stdio needs a command and space-separated args; HTTP/SSE need a URL.

Add Server

Writes the entry into config.yaml (env/headers preserved, secrets redacted on read-back).

Test

Actually spawns the server (or opens the connection) and runs the real MCP handshake — the same code path the agent uses — and shows the tools it advertises, or the connection error.

Removing a server deletes its entry outright.

Transports

All three transports are implemented in aios-mcp’s client and are used by the agent at startup, not just by the dashboard’s Test button:

stdio — spawns command+args, speaks newline-delimited JSON-RPC over the child’s stdio. The most common case (npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem /root, etc).
Streamable HTTP — a url with no transport key.
Legacy SSE — a url with transport: sse.

A server that fails to connect at agent startup is logged and skipped — one bad server never blocks the agent from starting.

Tool naming

Every MCP tool is exposed to the LLM namespaced as mcp__<server>__<tool>, keeping third-party tool names from colliding with AIOS built-ins and making their origin obvious in tool-call logs. A server’s tools: list in config.yaml restricts which of its tools are advertised at all; omit it to expose everything the server offers.

Note

Secrets in a server’s env (or headers, for remote servers) are redacted on every read — the dashboard shows only the first few characters, never the full value.