Quickstart

By the end of this you will have an MCP server running under Statio, a permission granted to yourself, and an agent calling a tool through the gateway with the credential injected server-side.

Prerequisites

A Statio account and an organization (app.statio.dev)
An MCP client — Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, or anything speaking MCP

1. Install a server from the catalog

In the dashboard, open Catalog and install one. Statio deploys it, discovers its tools, and registers each tool so it can be granted individually.

Catalog servers run on Statio's shared infrastructure, so there is nothing to deploy yourself. To bring your own, see Deploy your own MCP server.

2. Add the upstream credential

Open the server, go to Credentials, and add the key it needs upstream — a GitHub token, a Stripe key, whatever that API expects.

Warning

This is the last time you handle that value. It is encrypted at rest and injected into the upstream request at proxy time; it is never returned by the API and never sent to your agent.

3. Grant yourself the tool

Nothing is permitted by default — a freshly installed server is reachable by nobody, including you.

Under Permissions, grant a tool to yourself or a team. Grants are per tool, so a server exposing twelve tools can expose exactly the two you meant.

4. Create an API key

Settings → API Keys → Create. Copy it now; it is shown once.

A key acts with the authority of the person who created it and can never exceed it. Revoking that person's grants revokes the key's reach at the same moment.

5. Point your client at the gateway

Your MCP server URL becomes:

TEXT

https://api.statio.dev/<server-name>/mcp

Send the key as a bearer token:

JSON

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github": {
      "url": "https://api.statio.dev/github/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer pk_live_..." }
    }
  }
}

Client-by-client setup is in Connect a client.

6. Make a call

Ask your agent to use one of the granted tools. What happens:

The gateway authenticates the key and resolves its creator.
It checks that person holds permission for that tool.
It fetches the upstream credential from the vault and injects it.
It forwards the request and records the call.

Open Audit in the dashboard — the call is there, with the tool, the principal and the outcome.

What to try next

Call a tool you did not grant. The gateway refuses it, and the refusal is recorded too. That is the whole product in one request: permission is checked per tool, not per server, and the answer is written down either way.