How Oplink Uses mcporter

Oplink delegates all communication with external MCP servers to mcporter. mcporter handles process orchestration (stdio) and HTTP connectors, tool discovery, schema caching, and basic retries.

Why mcporter

• Stable stdio/HTTP transport to any MCP server
• Catalog discovery and schema normalization
• OAuth hand-off for hosted servers (e.g., Linear)

Where it fits

1. You declare external servers in .mcp-workflows/servers.json.
2. Oplink loads and validates this registry and passes it to mcporter.
3. When a workflow calls an external tool, Oplink forwards the call to mcporter, which launches/connects to the server and executes the tool.
4. Results stream back to Oplink and then to your MCP client (Cursor, Claude, etc.).

Discovery and caching

• Oplink uses mcporter to run discovery calls (e.g., list/tools/list) and populate an in-memory cache of tool schemas per alias.
• describe_tools reads from that cache and can optionally include or omit JSON Schemas (includeSchemas flag).
• Workflows that use externalServers can route calls to any tool from those aliases without copying schemas into your repo.

Auth handoff

• API keys: use ${ENV_VAR} placeholders in servers.json; Oplink expands them from process.env (after auto‑loading .env files from your --config directory) before creating the mcporter runtime.
• OAuth: for hosted servers (e.g., Linear), use auth: "oauth" and run via npx mcp-remote <endpoint>. mcporter handles browser/device flow and stores tokens in tokenCacheDir.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to @steipete for advocacy and early feedback around MCP developer tooling and interop.

Verify with mcporter

Use mcporter directly to inspect a server alias without running the full Oplink server:

npx mcporter list linear --config examples/linear-discord-demo/.mcp-workflows

If authentication is required, mcporter guides you through the flow.

Note: All examples in this documentation are illustrative. You can wire in any MCP server (stdio or HTTP), whether it requires OAuth, an API key, or no authentication at all. The mechanics remain the same: declare the server in servers.json, supply any required environment variables, and let mcporter handle transport and discovery.