Closes #1. Closes gitea-mcp#58. Closes gitea-mcp#60. Three small changes to one decision point, kept together because they are the same surface and the same incident. 1. A JWT IS NEVER A STATIC-TOKEN MISMATCH (gitea-mcp#58) The fall-through reason was chosen by which comparison ran last, not by what the caller presented. So a JWT against a server with no JWT auth configured logged: reason=static_token_mismatch token_type=jwt status=401 The two fields contradict each other, and the sentence reads as "you presented the wrong token" when the truth is "this server could not have accepted any token of that kind". The misdirection reached the user — claude.ai surfaces "Authorization with gitea failed. You can check your credentials and permissions." — and a debugging session went into re-running the OAuth flow while the credentials were valid throughout. Now `jwt_auth_not_configured` for a JWT; `static_token_mismatch` stays, and is asserted to stay, for an actual static-token mismatch. Fixing the misleading case must not delete the accurate one. Note this is now the ONLY way to reach that branch with a JWT: since v0.6.0 a validator that merely could not reach its issuer is non-nil and answers ErrUnavailable -> 503. A nil validator means the server was never given an issuer. 2. SUCCESS IS LOGGED, WITH THE PATH THAT GRANTED IT (gitea-mcp#60) The middleware logged only on rejection. After re-authing a connector there was no way to tell whether a request used the static token or a JWT, only inference from which failures were absent. A log that proves a request failed, and nothing about how the successful ones succeeded, cannot answer the question anyone actually has during an auth incident. INFO mcp auth accepted auth_path=jwt caller=alice token_fp=... remote=... INFO mcp auth accepted auth_path=static token_fp=... remote=... Same disclosure rules as deny: a fingerprint, never the credential. The JWT subject is included because distinguishing WHO is the point of that path; `caller` is omitted rather than empty for the static path, which has no identity to report. 3. JWKS REFRESH INTERVAL IS CONFIGURABLE (#1) It was hardcoded at 1h, so an issuer rotating its signing key could leave every consumer rejecting valid JWTs for up to an hour. WithRefreshInterval, defaulting to 1h so nothing changes for existing callers. Variadic, per #1's own preferred option — a new positional parameter would force a coordinated bump across every consumer. Deliberately NOT read from the environment inside the library: a shared lib calling os.Getenv is a hidden dependency that surprises its consumers. Config ownership stays at the edge. The effective value is logged when an issuer resolves, which is #1's second acceptance criterion and the thing an operator needs during a key-rotation incident. The test asserts the configured value reaches the registration site via that line — a silently-ignored option being the failure mode worth pinning. Whether jwx then honours it is jwx's to test. One of my own assertions was wrong and the test caught it: tokenType() says "opaque", not "static", for a non-JWT credential. Corrected to the existing vocabulary rather than changing the vocabulary to match a new test. Verified: golangci-lint 0 issues; go vet clean; go test -race -count=1 ok. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
mcp-chassis
Shared Go library for Mathias-owned MCP servers. Provides the auth + middleware primitives that every MCP server needs.
Why
By 2026-05-22 there were three+ MCP servers (gitea-mcp, brain-mcp /
ingestion, future ones from template-go-agent) each carrying their
own near-identical:
- Dex JWT validator (~80 LOC, identical
jwx/v2plumbing) - Bearer middleware (~50 LOC, dual-mode static + JWT)
- RFC 9728 protected-resource metadata handler (~25 LOC)
The homelab architecture review's spike S3 (see
gitea.d-ma.be/mathias/infra/docs/superpowers/handoffs/2026-05-22-mcp-chassis-spike.md)
concluded a thin shared lib pays for itself within the first migration.
This is that lib.
Non-goals
- Replacing each MCP's tool registration / handler logic — that is per-domain.
- Solving HTTP routing — consumers keep their own
http.ServeMux. - Solving observability — see
gitea.d-ma.be/mathias/hyperguild/ingestion/internal/metricsfor the hand-rolled Prometheus pattern. May absorb ametricssubpackage here later, once a second consumer needs it.
Packages
auth
JWTValidator— Dex OIDC JWT validation.nilis a valid value meaning "JWT auth disabled".BearerMiddleware— static-Bearer-or-Dex-JWT gate. Static wins first; only emitsWWW-Authenticate: Bearer ... resource_metadata=...on 401 whenresourceMetadataURLis non-empty (claude.ai OAuth discovery).ProtectedResourceHandler— RFC 9728 metadata document forGET /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource.
Usage
package main
import (
"context"
"net/http"
"os"
"git.d-ma.be/mathias/mcp-chassis/auth"
)
func main() {
staticToken := os.Getenv("BRAIN_MCP_TOKEN")
dexIssuer := os.Getenv("DEX_ISSUER_URL")
audience := os.Getenv("MCP_AUDIENCE")
resourceURL := os.Getenv("MCP_RESOURCE_URL")
validator, err := auth.NewJWTValidator(context.Background(), dexIssuer, audience)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
mux := http.NewServeMux()
mux.HandleFunc("GET /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource",
auth.ProtectedResourceHandler(resourceURL, dexIssuer))
mux.Handle("/mcp", auth.BearerMiddleware(
staticToken,
validator,
"brain",
resourceURL+"/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource",
mcpHandler(),
))
_ = http.ListenAndServe(":3300", mux)
}
func mcpHandler() http.Handler { /* per-domain */ return nil }
Versioning
Trunk-based development on main. Tagged with semver. Consumers pin
specific tags (go.mod require git.d-ma.be/mathias/mcp-chassis v0.x.y)
and bump deliberately.
Migrations are documented per-consumer in the consumer's CHANGELOG / commits.
Dependencies
github.com/lestrrat-go/jwx/v2— JWKS cache + JWT parsing. Same dep every MCP already had; no new transitive cost when adopting the chassis.github.com/stretchr/testify— tests only.
stdlib otherwise.