csa-zendesk

project_tracker_base: CINO Project Tracker:appf7fRQUvY9Iy7sL
project_tracker_table: Projects:tblchmbxSAavvJKaY
project_tracker_record: csa-zendesk:recvtmgqPccgLvuXz
project_source: github:CloudSecurityAlliance-Internal/CINO-Projects/projects/CloudSecurityAlliance/csa-zendesk

A Python library and local stdio MCP server over the Zendesk REST API, targeting 100% API coverage.

Status: API surface enumerated. Nothing implemented. There is no src/ yet. This repository currently holds the upstream API snapshots, the operation inventory, and the probe findings that will constrain the design. Do not describe any feature below as working.

Scope

825 of 882 machine-readable operations at 1.0.0 — which is coverage of the published specs, not of the API. The Help Center spec describes roughly 18 of ~30 documented families; about a dozen, several of them live, have no spec entry and need hand-written methods. See analysis/API-SURFACE.md §4b.

Related MCP server: @modusop/mcp-server

Why this exists

The third-party Zendesk MCP servers are thin. The most popular — 115★, actively maintained, genuinely well built — ships 7 tools. The largest ships ~47. Against 882 operations.

More consequentially, the whole field shares four weaknesses:

• No capability policy. OAuth scopes, fixed at client registration, are the only control. Zendesk has 54 granular scopes, which gives a local fail-closed policy layer something real to bind to.

• Offset pagination everywhere. Zendesk caps offset paging at 100 pages / 10,000 records and then returns HTTP 400. Large result sets truncate, and the tools present the truncation as an answer.

• API-token auth. Zendesk permanently deactivates all API tokens on 2027-04-30, and no account can create a new one after 2026-10-27.

• Pre-2.0 MCP SDK. Hand-rolled list_tools/call_tool dispatch means no structured output and no tool annotations, so a client cannot tell a read from a destructive write.

Architecture

Third in the line after csa-skilljar and csa-google-workspace, on the same spine:

Backend (Protocol)   the seam - keyword-only args, returns raw upstream envelopes
    ^ wrapped by
PolicyBackend        capability gating; FAILS CLOSED - an ungated method is refused
    ^ consumed by
ZendeskClient        thin typed library surface (the public product)
    ^ consumed by
mcp/_tools/*.py      per-family register_*(app, get_client) producers

Enforcement lives in the wrapper around the seam, not in the tools, so a library embedder gets the same guarantee an MCP client does.

What is here

Zendesk publishes the OpenAPI specs but links to none of them; all three were found by probing URL shapes. They are snapshots of someone else's moving target — re-fetch and diff before trusting them.

Findings that constrain the design

Six are recorded in analysis/API-SURFACE.md. The three that change how the code must be written:

1. users/me.json returns HTTP 200 with "name": "Anonymous user" when wholly unauthenticated. It serves anonymous Help Center visitors, so it degrades instead of refusing — and it is the endpoint every client uses as a credential health check. Validating against it reports healthy for a missing credential. Credential validation probes a resource endpoint and asserts a non-null user.id.

2. Search takes offset pagination only and stops at 1000 results, while reporting a count of six figures. A tool that surfaces count as if the caller could page to it is lying. search/export is the cursor-paginated, uncapped alternative.

3. Pagination cannot be generated from the specs. The Help Center spec declares paging on 0 of 96 GET operations, yet cursor paging demonstrably works. The generator must not read silence as "unpaginated".

Deliberate exclusions

Six families — 47 operations, 5% of the surface — are out of scope and will not be built: IT Asset Management, Group SLA Policies, Workspaces, Ticket Form Statuses, Audit Logs, and Help Center Service Catalog Items. The development account cannot reach them (403: a plan boundary), so they cannot be tested, and this project does not ship API code it has never called. See ADR-001 for the reasoning and WAITING-FOR-001 for what would reopen it.

This does not relax the error layer: plan boundaries differ per account, so any deployment can meet a 403 on an endpoint we did implement, and the taxonomy must say "your plan does not include this" rather than "this is broken".

Configuration

Credentials come from ./.env, which is gitignored:

The API token is a stopgap. It is unscoped, carries full admin rights, bypasses account 2FA, and Zendesk retires it on 2027-04-30. The shipped design authenticates with OAuth.

set -a; . ./.env; set +a
python3 scripts/inventory.py         # 882 operations
python3 scripts/probe_families.py    # 43/49 families reachable

License

Apache 2.0.