@the-rfp-hub/mcp

A Model Context Protocol server for the RFPSear.ch — search Ethereum-ecosystem funding opportunities (grants, hackathons, bounties, accelerators, VC funds, RFPs) from any MCP client, and optionally submit one, with a human approval step that lives outside the tool channel. MIT licensed.

Search is anonymous: no credential, no account, nothing to configure beyond the client entry. A credential is needed only to submit, and only when submitting is explicitly turned on.

Submit from an agent

If the agent only needs to search and fetch, skip this section: install the server below with no credential. To let it submit:

1. Sign in to the deployment's API keys page — https://rfpsear.ch/keys for the hosted Hub, or /keys on a local or staging frontend. Its MCP card prepares the safe scopes below.
2. Choose read and write, leave publish off, and mint the key. This is the safe path: a submission is stored but waits for review instead of appearing immediately.
3. Copy the secret when it appears. It is shown once. The page also shows the exact API origin that belongs in RFPHUB_API_BASE.
4. Configure the client-neutral stdio connection below, then put the origin in RFPHUB_API_BASE and the secret in RFPHUB_API_KEY inside the client's private MCP environment. Never put the secret in a prompt, tool argument or shell command.
5. Restart the client. tools/list now includes submit_opportunity; its first call checks the key's scope and only previews, and a terminal approval is still required before a call writes.

The API keys page is the handoff: it creates the credential and links back here in a new tab, so the one-time secret remains visible while you configure the client.

Install

Client-neutral connection

RFPSear.ch MCP is model-provider and client agnostic. It is a local stdio server: the client launches one process, sends MCP messages on standard input and reads them on standard output. The server does not know which model, vendor or host launched it.

Every compatible client receives the same connection contract:

The names a client gives these fields may vary, but the process and environment do not. Prefer a user-private configuration or secret input; never commit the key to a repository. Restart the client after adding or rotating it.

The exact package version above is intentional. An npm version is immutable; @latest is not, and an MCP server is code your agent runs with your permissions. Pin it, and bump it deliberately.

Equivalent client examples

These are adapters for the same contract, not separate integrations. Omit the environment block for anonymous search and fetch.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport stdio rfp-hub -- npx -y @the-rfp-hub/mcp@0.1.4

# project-scoped instead of user-scoped — writes .mcp.json in the repo
claude mcp add --scope project --transport stdio rfp-hub -- npx -y @the-rfp-hub/mcp@0.1.4

Those commands install anonymous search and fetch. For submission, add RFPHUB_API_BASE and RFPHUB_API_KEY to the server's private environment using Claude's local or user configuration; keep a shared project .mcp.json secret-free.

A project-scoped server (--scope project) shows as "Pending approval" until claude is run interactively once in that directory. Headless use — CI, scripts, claude -p — needs claude -p ... --mcp-config .mcp.json --strict-mcp-config to load it without that interactive step.

Claude Desktop and Cursor

Root key mcpServers, in claude_desktop_config.json or .cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rfp-hub": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@the-rfp-hub/mcp@0.1.4"],
      "env": {
        "RFPHUB_API_BASE": "https://api.rfpsear.ch",
        "RFPHUB_API_KEY": "rfph_…"
      }
    }
  }
}

VS Code

Root key servers, in .vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "rfp-hub": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@the-rfp-hub/mcp@0.1.4"],
      "env": {
        "RFPHUB_API_BASE": "https://api.rfpsear.ch",
        "RFPHUB_API_KEY": "${input:rfphub-key}"
      }
    }
  },
  "inputs": [
    {
      "type": "promptString",
      "id": "rfphub-key",
      "description": "RFPSear.ch API key",
      "password": true
    }
  ]
}

Codex CLI

codex mcp add rfp-hub -- npx -y @the-rfp-hub/mcp@0.1.4

That command installs anonymous search and fetch. For submission, edit ~/.codex/config.toml (or a trusted project's .codex/config.toml) and add the private environment table below to the server entry. Replace both values with the exact origin and one-time key shown by the API keys page, then restart Codex. This follows the official Codex MCP configuration.

[mcp_servers.rfp-hub]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "@the-rfp-hub/mcp@0.1.4"]

[mcp_servers.rfp-hub.env]
RFPHUB_API_BASE = "https://api.rfpsear.ch"
RFPHUB_API_KEY = "rfph_…"

Companion skill

funding-search is a read-only agent skill that teaches a client how to use this server's search and fetch tools well. It is not shipped inside this npm package — it installs from the repository, through whichever of these channels your client supports:

npx skills add The-RFP-Hub/the-rfp-hub --skill funding-search

claude plugin marketplace add The-RFP-Hub/the-rfp-hub

Or copy the skill directory manually into .claude/skills/, .agents/skills/ (Codex), or .gemini/skills/.

Configuration

Two environment variables and one flag. A variable is for a secret — which must never sit on argv, where every process on the machine can read it — or for the identity of the deployment. Everything else is a flag or a fixed constant, so that running this server needs nothing from whoever administers your environment.

The per-request deadline is a fixed 20 seconds, headers and body together. It is not configurable: a deadline an operator can raise is a deadline a stalled destination can hold a tool call open behind.

RFPHUB_API_BASE is checked at startup, before any preview can exist, and four shapes are refused outright:

• plain http: for anything but 127.0.0.1, [::1] or localhost — the write request carries a bearer credential, and a human approving an origin does not make cleartext safe;
• a username or password in the URL — it would end up in every diagnostic this server writes (no error message ever repeats the value of this variable, for the same reason);
• a path, query or fragment — the approval binds the origin, so two bases that differ only after the host would produce the same approval and reach different endpoints;
• anything that is not an absolute http/https URL.

https://api.rfpsear.ch, https://api.rfpsear.ch/, https://api.rfpsear.ch:443 and https://API.rfpsear.ch are one destination and produce one approval id. Port 444, or a different host, is a different destination and a different id.

Rotating the key means restarting the server. Configuration is read once, at startup, and the credential's fingerprint is one of the five things an approval binds to. A key swapped in the client's env block reaches this process only on its next start; until then previews are still bound to the old fingerprint, and a commit under the new one is refused as a mismatch. Restart before previewing under a new key.

The key goes in the client's env block. Never in a prompt, and never as a tool argument — there is no parameter on any tool through which one could be passed, and a test asserts that.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rfp-hub": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@the-rfp-hub/mcp@0.1.4"],
      "env": {
        "RFPHUB_API_KEY": "rfph_…"
      }
    }
  }
}

The key must carry write and must not carry publish, and this server checks that before its first submission. A publish key is refused, because an approved submission would go live at once.

Tools

search_opportunities (read)

Filters: q, fundingType[], status[], ecosystem[], category[], organization, minAward, maxAward, deadlineAfter, deadlineBefore, sort, order, page, limit (max 25). An unknown parameter is an error, never a filter that silently does nothing.

Each result row carries the id, namespace, title, funding type, status, operating organizations, ecosystems, a rendered award line, the next fixed deadline, and two link-out URLs.

It does not return description or summary. That is deliberate and it is the main safety property of this server: those are the longest free-text fields a publisher controls, they are where an instruction addressed to your agent would live, and twenty of them would dominate the context window. Ask for a full record by id when you actually need the prose.

fetch_opportunity (read)

One record in full, as an RFP Hub Standard document, inside an envelope of { notice, opportunity, links }. The document is structurally unmodified — no field removed, none added, no value changed — except that any value shaped like an API key is replaced with a redaction marker on every outbound message, this one included. Not byte-identical otherwise: it is parsed and re-serialized on the way through, so key order and whitespace are the transport's business.

submit_opportunity (write — registered only when a key is configured)

Two calls with a person in between. See the next section.

The submission result keeps the API's isListed value as an editorial preference and adds isPubliclyVisible as the actual visibility signal. A record is publicly visible only when reviewStatus is approved and isListed is true; a pending record with isListed: true still waits for review.

Submitting, and the approval step

1. call submit_opportunity { document }
     → checks the key's scope, validates locally, writes nothing, returns:
       { status: "pending", approvalId: "<64 hex>", preview: {...}, instruction: "..." }

2. a person runs, in their own terminal:
     npx @the-rfp-hub/mcp@0.1.4 approve <approvalId>
     → prints the destination, the credential fingerprint, the operation, the protocol
       revision and the whole document, then asks for confirmation

3. call submit_opportunity { document, approvalId }
     → claims the approval (single-use), POSTs, returns the result

rfphub-mcp pending lists what is waiting. rfphub-mcp revoke <id> deletes one.

What the approval binds to

An approval is not merely "this document was approved". Its id is a hash over five things, and approve prints all five before asking:

Change any one of them and the approval no longer applies, and the refusal names which one moved. An approval granted against staging cannot be spent against production. One granted under a key is refused after that key is rotated, because the binding is the key's fingerprint.

The approval is single-use, claimed by an atomic rename before the request goes out, and it is never restored — including after a timeout. If a submission's outcome is ambiguous, check GET /v1/me/opportunities (the public read hides entries awaiting review) before doing anything else. A pending preview expires 15 minutes after it is taken; approving it opens a fresh 15-minute window for the submission.

What this does — and what it does not

What it does. Approving leaves the MCP channel entirely. No tool response ever carries an approval secret, so a model cannot read one out of its own context and spend it in the same turn. Approving becomes a deliberate act at a terminal, in front of a screen showing exactly where the write is going and with which credential.

What it does not do. This is not a boundary against an agent that holds a shell and a filesystem as the same operating-system user. Coding agents routinely hold both. Such an agent can run this CLI in a pseudo-terminal, or write the approval file directly; the 0600/0700 permissions do not stop it, because it is that user. Nothing here should be read as "the model cannot approve".

If you need a boundary that really is separate, the options are outside this package: an approval UI provided by the host application, a distinct OS identity for the agent's process, or a signing key the agent cannot reach. See adr/0012.

Errors

Every failure carries one of seven codes.

A response over 1 MB fails rather than truncating, and the cap is applied while the body is being read, so an enormous response costs bounded memory. Half a JSON document is not a smaller answer, it is a wrong one; narrow the request instead.

A submission whose outcome cannot be known says so. Once the request has left, the only clean answer is a coded 4xx — the API read it, decided, and the answer was no. Everything else is reported as may have landed, never as a plain failure, and points at GET /v1/me/opportunities:

• a dropped connection, or a body that stops mid-stream;
• a body that is not JSON, or is over the cap;
• a 5xx, however well-formed its body — the API commits the row and then does more work, so a server error while answering is entirely consistent with a row that exists;
• a 2xx whose body is not a submission result — an empty 200, a {}, an answer from something that is not this API;
• a 3xx (see below).

The approval is spent in every one of those cases.

A submission never follows a redirect — and an unfollowed redirect is still ambiguous. The document and the credential are never re-sent to a host this server did not resolve and nobody approved; an approval binds the destination origin, so continuing elsewhere would spend a decision made about somewhere else. But not followed is not not written: POST/Redirect/GET is the ordinary way a server acknowledges something it has just created, so a 3xx is reported as may have landed, with the destination named so you can see where you were being sent.

Arguments are validated against the published schema, and a malformed call comes back with the same codes as everything else. An unknown parameter is an error rather than a filter that silently does nothing.

Local state

Everything lives under the state directory — --state-dir, default ~/.rfphub — with the directory at 0700 and files at 0600.

--state-dir takes precedence over the operating system's idea of this user's home directory. Pass it wherever that idea is unreliable: a container, a service account, a systemd unit or a launch agent may have no home directory, may have one that is read-only, or may share one with another identity. This server refuses rather than guesses — see below.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rfp-hub": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@the-rfp-hub/mcp@0.1.4", "--state-dir", "/var/lib/rfphub"]
    }
  }
}

Pass the same directory to the approval commands. The server writes the preview there and rfphub-mcp approve reads it back; given different directories, pending shows nothing while a real preview waits somewhere else. Every command this server prints for a person to run already carries the flag when one was given — the preview's instruction, the refusal when a commit arrives unapproved, and the approve line in rfphub-mcp --state-dir /var/lib/rfphub pending — shell-quoted, so a path with a space survives the paste.

The modes are checked, not merely requested. On every use the home is lstated and must be a real directory — not a symlink, not a file — and every state file must be a regular file with no second hard link. A path this server is about to write is chmodded to 0700/0600 and the mode is then read back, because a chmod that reports success on a filesystem without POSIX modes has established nothing.

A file this server is about to trust is verified instead, and never repaired: an approval or a counter file that is already world-readable, or that has a second hard link, has already been exposed to whatever holds it, and tightening the mode afterwards neither un-exposes it nor makes the decision inside it yours. Those reads refuse — policy_denied — and go on refusing until the file is removed. rfphub-mcp pending simply omits a record it cannot vouch for. The audit log is written rather than trusted, so it is repaired; it still declines to write into a path it could not secure, and it is opened and judged through one descriptor so a rotation cannot slip a fresh default-mode file under the append. A log path that is a symlink, or anything but a regular file, is declined rather than followed — O_NOFOLLOW where the platform has it, and an lstat before the open everywhere, which is the only guard on a platform that does not (a small window between the two, failing closed into dropping a line rather than into writing through the link).

The audit log is bounded. At 5 MiB it is rotated to audit.log.1 under a lock, keeping exactly one previous generation at 0600. A rotation that fails costs the rotation, never the call and never the line.

A clock that moves backwards buys nothing. If a counter window on disk is ahead of the current one — an NTP correction, a resumed snapshot, a hand-set clock — the stored count is kept and counted in rather than reset, and an approval stamped in the future reads as outside its window. Budget stays spent until real time catches up, which is the safe direction for a limiter.

Rate limits fail closed. If the counter store cannot be read or written, calls are refused — a budget that cannot be counted cannot be enforced. Keep the state directory writable.

The counters are correct across processes. Check-and-increment runs under a lock directory (policy-counters.lock), because an MCP client and a terminal running this same package share one home directory by design, and an unlocked read-modify-write lets two processes through a cap of one. A lock left behind by a process that died is broken after five seconds — by renaming it aside, so that two processes breaking the same abandoned lock cannot end up deleting a live one.

The write budget is reserved before the approval is claimed. A local refusal — an exhausted daily budget, a lost race for the approval — gives the budget back and leaves the approval intact, so nobody has to be asked to approve the same submission twice.

Approving is decided at the moment you answer, not when the preview was printed. The preview is claimed by an atomic rename after your confirmation, so two terminals approving the same id produce one approval, and a preview that was revoked or expired while it sat on screen is refused.

Refused submissions are metered too. The three kinds a caller can reason about are read, preview and commit — one per phase of work that actually happened. attempt is a fourth, internal kind: an abuse-control meter, not a phase. Every invocation of the write tool spends one (20/minute, 400/day) before any work — including a call whose arguments are rejected before the handler runs, which is the cheapest thing to repeat. A loop of bogus approval ids, malformed arguments or oversized documents cannot run unmetered. Running out of attempt never masks the real error: bad arguments still come back as bad arguments.

The audit log records argument key names and byte counts, never values. A log that stored values would be a second copy of every document and every search term. Failing to write it never fails a call.

Defaults: read 60/minute, preview 10/minute, commit 2/minute and 5 per day, attempt 20/minute and 400/day.

Security notes

• The credential is environment-only. No tool takes one; reads never send one.
• A key-shaped string anywhere in a submitted document is refused before any request is made. The API stores the text it is given, so a key inside description would be persisted and only then redacted out of the reply — redaction of output cannot help with that.
• Redaction is a backstop, not the control. Every outbound surface — text, structured content, error messages, the audit log — is scanned recursively for key-shaped strings.
• URLs are inert. This server never follows a URL from any record, and the notice attached to every result says the client should not either.
• Every third-party string is bounded. Titles are cut at 140 characters, ecosystem labels at 40 characters and 8 values (the row says how many were dropped). ecosystems is an open list in the standard — no registry, no enum — so leaving it unbounded would have made it the obvious place to park a payload.
• Residual risk, stated plainly: title, organization names and ecosystem labels are third-party text and they do reach the model. They are delimited and labeled. Labeling is a hint, not a control, and a hostile title is not made harmless by it. The projection — the missing description — is the control.
• A preview refuses what the API would refuse. The API's admission limits (title 256, summary 1 000, description 50 000, top-level arrays 100 entries, body 256 KiB) are checked locally, so nobody is asked to approve a submission that could never have been accepted. The array cap is top-level only, exactly as the API applies it — checking more here would refuse documents the API would have taken.
• Suspected-duplicate titles are third-party text too. They come back truncated to 140 characters, delimited, and labeled — the write path is where a caller is most primed to act, so it gets the same treatment the search results get.
• structuredContent is not a safety boundary. It is delivered to the model like any other output. It exists here for contract and validation.
• Every request has a deadline. A peer that accepts a connection and then says nothing, or sends half a body and stops, is abandoned after 20 seconds. A read reports that and is not retried. A write reports it as an ambiguous outcome, because the request had already left.
• A 2xx is not believed until its body has been checked. A read whose body is not the shape this build knows fails rather than returning a plausible empty record; a write whose body is not a submission result — including a 204, or a duplicateCheck value this build predates — is reported as "may have landed", with GET /v1/me/opportunities named as the place to find out. Unknown extra members are always allowed: this client does not own the contract.
• Pin exact versions, as every example above does. That is the only real defense against a future version of any npm package behaving differently from the one you reviewed.

Development

pnpm --filter @the-rfp-hub/mcp build   # required before the test suite: it drives dist/cli.js
pnpm --filter @the-rfp-hub/mcp test

The transport is chosen in src/cli.ts; src/server.ts registers the tools and knows nothing about it. Adding an HTTP entry point is a new file, not a refactor.