Allow spaces or more symbols in MCP server names
Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Apr 23, 2026 by oprypkhantt Closed Jul 1, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What variant of Codex are you using?
CLI
What feature would you like to see?
Hey. Currently the validation for MCP servers warns if name contains anything other than letters, numbers, _ or -. My assumption is this limitation stems from TOML spec, used for Codex config:
Bare keys may only contain ASCII letters, ASCII digits, underscores, and dashes (A-Za-z0-9_-)
But TOML also supports quoted keys, like so:
[mcp_servers."Postgres MCP - Production - Read Only"]
...
[mcp_servers."Postgres MCP - Development"]
...This is useful for a case like shown above - to give more easily readable names to MCP servers. Would you consider expanding the validation to at least support all ASCII characters?
2 Comments
I do not have permission to open a PR, but here's a branch with a fix: https://github.com/openai/codex/compare/main...autaut03:codex:mcp-server-names-ascii
Needs to be checked by someone that actually knows what they're doing though 😅
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