Connect Hermes and Other Clients

Interactive clients such as claude.ai and ChatGPT sign in through a browser. Headless clients — command-line agents, servers, scheduled jobs — cannot open a browser, so they authenticate with a static API token instead.

Any MCP client that supports the streamable HTTP transport and an Authorization header can connect this way.

1. Generate an API token

Sign in and open API tokens (also linked from the dashboard).
Name the token after the client that will use it, for example Hermes — the name makes it easy to revoke the right token later.
Choose Generate Token.
Copy the token immediately. It is shown only once; Kafkai stores only a hash of it.

2. Connect Hermes

Hermes reads its MCP servers from ~/.hermes/config.yaml. Keep the token out of that file. Put it in ~/.hermes/.env, which Hermes loads into the environment:

KAFKAI_API_TOKEN=YOUR_API_TOKEN

Then add the server under mcp_servers in ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

mcp_servers:
  kafkai:
    url: "https://kafkai.com/mcp"
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer ${KAFKAI_API_TOKEN}"

Run /reload-mcp in a running Hermes session, or start a new one. Hermes prefixes tool names with the server name, so the Kafkai tools appear as mcp_kafkai_list_projects and so on.

2b. Connect any other client

Point the client at the endpoint and send the token as a Bearer header:

Endpoint: https://kafkai.com/mcp
Header: Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN

For clients configured with JSON, the shape is usually:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "kafkai": {
      "url": "https://kafkai.com/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN"
      }
    }
  }
}

3. Verify

Ask the agent to list your Kafkai projects. A successful call to kafkai_list_projects means the token works. From there, the prompts on the Example Prompts page apply as-is.

Managing tokens

The API tokens page lists your active tokens with their creation and last-used dates. Revoke a token there and it stops working immediately.

Treat API tokens like passwords:

one token per client, so revoking one does not break the others,
never commit a token to a repository or paste it into shared chats,
revoke tokens you no longer use.