Connecting Claude (MCP)

AccessVault ships an MCP sidecar — a bundled binary that speaks standard MCP over stdio — so Claude Code or Claude Desktop can query your managed databases. Every call routes through the app and is recorded in your audit log before results are returned. Claude is the tested integration path; any MCP-compatible client should be able to connect the same way.

Register the sidecar with Claude Code

1. Connect to a database — the MCP sidecar panel appears in the connection’s detail header only while the connection is active.

2. Click Copy command. This copies a ready-to-run registration command of the form:

   claude mcp add --scope user accessvault '<sidecar path>' \
     --catalog '<per-connection catalog path>' \
     --api-url http://127.0.0.1:9876 \
     --bearer-token <64-char token>

3. Paste it into a terminal and run it.

4. In any Claude Code session, the enabled tools from that connection’s catalog are now available. Each call round-trips Claude → MCP sidecar → AccessVault → your database → back, and the audit entry is written before Claude sees the result.

Things to know

• AccessVault must be running (and the connection active) for Claude to reach the database — the sidecar has no database access of its own; it can only call the app. See Security Model.
• The bearer token changes on every app launch. After you quit and reopen AccessVault, the previously registered command holds a stale token, so re-run Copy command and register again. See Troubleshooting.
• The sidecar serves only tools that are enabled in the catalog, and hot-reloads the catalog when you edit it — no re-registration needed for tool changes.
• Query results are capped at 1,000 rows per call, with a flag telling Claude the result was truncated.