Authenticating with oauth protected MCP servers fails in WebIDEs
What issue are you seeing?
Currently Codex can advertise a non-localhost MCP OAuth callback URL via mcp_oauth_callback_url, which is needed when running Codex in a remote environment such as codeserver/WebIDE.
However, WebIDE/code-server exposes forwarded ports through a path prefix, while Codex receives the forwarded callback without that prefix. For example, Codex may advertise:
https://example.domain/proxy/43119/callback/<callback_id>
but receive:
/callback/<callback_id>
Codex currently requires the received callback path to exactly match the advertised path, so this callback is rejected.
This means it is impossible to authenticate oauth protected mcp servers when running codex on WebIDE/codeserver
What steps can reproduce the bug?
- Setup a codeserver/WebIDE environment.
- Define config for an OAuth protected MCP server in
config.toml - Define callback url and port for MCP server in
config.toml - try to authenticate with codex mcp login [NAME]
- new tab opens in browser window
- but OH NO: "This site can’t be reached"
What is the expected behavior?
New tab in browser should indicate successful authentication and when going back to codeserver tab, the MCP server authentication process in the terminal should be completed.
Additional information
This issue can be easily solved by adding a new mcp_oauth_callback_path_mode parameter with the following options.
mcp_oauth_callback_path_mode = "exact" # default
mcp_oauth_callback_path_mode = "suffix"
exact preserves the current behavior. suffix allows the received callback path to be a suffix of the advertised path, so WebIDE/code-server proxy callbacks work while still requiring the callback id to match.
I would like to open a PR. Is that possible @etraut-openai ?
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