Connections & MCP
MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is how Orbit talks to AI and how AI talks to Orbit. It runs in both directions: Orbit exposes an MCP server so any client (including Claude) can read your live project state and run operations, and Orbit consumes external MCP servers so Apollo can use other people’s tools.
Orbit as an MCP server
Section titled “Orbit as an MCP server”Orbit’s own server exposes dozens of tools — read status, queue a prompt, fetch context, run git, query a database, trigger a deploy. Any MCP-capable AI client points at your Orbit endpoint and gains live awareness of your projects. This is what makes a planning chat able to answer “what’s running” and “what shipped” without you pasting anything.
Connecting external MCP servers
Section titled “Connecting external MCP servers”Under Settings → Connections, you can connect external MCP servers with no-auth, bearer, or OAuth credentials, scoped globally or per project. Each tool an external server offers must be classified and then enabled before Apollo can call it — and untrusted tool descriptions are quarantined — so adding a server never silently grants it the ability to act. Once enabled, those tools run through the same approval flow as Orbit’s own actions, and Apollo gains a mcp.<server>.<tool> handle for each.
A Gallery offers Sivants-curated, pre-classified bundles (GitHub, Stripe, Gmail, marked ”✓ Verified”) plus an “Import from GitHub” path for community bundles; either way, adding a server lands it in a review-before-enable state.
Developer tooling
Section titled “Developer tooling”For building and debugging integrations, Orbit includes MCP Testing and MCP Debug panels under Settings → Developer: run a real tool call against any connected server using a schema-generated form with Raw and Envelope result tabs and copy-as-curl, and inspect a redacted call log. A “Local process” connection type can spawn a command as a local MCP server. Individual servers can also be toggled off without deleting them, which excludes them from generated agent config files so an offline server doesn’t cause startup hangs.