Skip to content

0001. Serve stdio, streamable HTTP and SSE from one command line

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-09-19
  • Deciders: maintainer

Context

The server spoke stdio (a client spawns the process, nothing listens) and, since 0.0.2, an authenticated streamable HTTP transport of its own (--transport http, http/transport.py: OAuth 2.1 resource server or a static dev-mode bearer token, X-MCP-Tenant tenant scoping) for shared multi-tenant deployments. That transport carries this server's auth model and flags; the rest of the suite had no HTTP listener at all. A gateway that fans one server out to many agents, or an auditor such as scout that speaks HTTP, needs the same command line on every server. The MCP specification now has two current revisions on the HTTP binding, 2025-11-25 (an initialize handshake and a session header) and 2026-07-28 (stateless, per-request _meta, server/discover), and clients on either must be served. The older HTTP+SSE transport (2024-11-05) is still what some hosts expect.

Options considered

  1. Stay on stdio plus the authenticated http transport and leave the suite-wide command line to a wrapper process.
  2. Add HTTP behind a bespoke module per server, each with its own flags.
  3. One shared module, copied verbatim into every server of the suite, that maps the same three flags onto the SDK's transports.

Decision

Option 3. iso20022-evidence-pack-mcp runs stdio; iso20022-evidence-pack-mcp --transport streamable-http listens on --host/--port at /mcp and speaks both current protocol revisions on that one endpoint, streaming responses as server-sent events and offering the server-to-client stream on GET; iso20022-evidence-pack-mcp --transport sse serves the older HTTP+SSE transport at /sse and /messages/. The module binds loopback unless told otherwise and adds no authentication of its own: a routable deployment sits behind a gateway the operator trusts. The authenticated --transport http with --bind stays as it was, an additional choice on the same command line.

Consequences

main() keeps its argparse parser and takes --host/--port from _cli.add_arguments, dispatching the two new choices through _transports.run; both files are the same in every server, so the suite is started, documented and tested the same way. Each server is verified over streamable HTTP with scout in both protocol eras and over SSE with the SDK client before release; the conformance workflow lists tools over every transport. The stdio and http tests stay as they were.