Zendesk MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that puts Zendesk inside your AI assistant. It finds answers in the Help Center; drafts, updates and translates articles while keeping the languages in sync; and handles Support tickets end to end, comments, triage and image attachments included. It all happens in plain language, without switching apps.

It does roughly what the Zendesk agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot does, minus the tie to one vendor: it drops into any MCP client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, and the rest). And it always acts with each user's own Zendesk permissions, never a shared admin key.

What your assistant can do

Ask in natural language; the assistant works out the context and the intent, then calls the right tools on your behalf.

• Find answers in the Help Center. "How do I request a software license?" or "what's the time-off policy?" surfaces the right article, matched by meaning rather than by keyword.

• Create, view and update tickets without leaving the conversation: open a ticket, check its status, add a public reply or an internal note, change the priority or the assignee, mark it solved.

• Summarize a ticket for a report or a quick decision. The assistant pulls the details and the full comment thread and gives you the gist in a sentence.

• Read the screenshots and photos attached to a ticket. Error dialogs, UI captures and product photos are handed to your assistant's own model as images, so it can describe them or act on what they show.

• Search and triage your queue in plain language: "show me my open tickets about billing from this week."

• Draft and maintain knowledge-base articles. You can write a new one, or revise a large one a single section at a time, so the whole HTML body never has to round-trip through the model.

Related MCP server: Zendesk MCP Server

Why this server

Most Zendesk integrations run on a shared admin API key, which hands every user full access to every ticket, and bolt on a fixed set of tools. This one is built differently.

• Per-user authentication, OAuth only. Both transports use OAuth 2.1 PKCE: each user signs in with their own Zendesk credentials, so the assistant sees and touches exactly what that person is allowed to, the same scoping you get by signing into Zendesk directly. Static API tokens are deliberately not supported (why).

• Section-based article editing. For large Help Center articles, read and rewrite one section at a time (parsed by h1/h2/h3 headings) instead of shuffling the full HTML body through the assistant. On a targeted edit that cuts tokens by a factor of 10 to 100.

• Native multimodal attachments. Ticket images come back as native MCP image content, so the client's own model (Claude, GPT, Gemini, whichever) sees the pixels directly. No server-side vision model, no extra API key, and nothing tying you to one provider. Non-image attachments come back as text references, and both image caps are configurable.

• A tool surface you can cap. Expose every operation as its own tool, group them into namespace proxies, or collapse everything into a single unified tool. You can also filter by namespace or down to read-only operations, so each context loads only the surface it needs (see Tool surface).

• Two deployment shapes, same auth story. Run it on your laptop as a stdio MCP server, or deploy it as a private remote MCP server reached over HTTP, with one Zendesk session per request and each client carrying its own user's token.

• A lean stack: the official @modelcontextprotocol/sdk plus zod, speaking to the Zendesk Support and Help Center (Guide) APIs.

Look elsewhere when:

• You need Zendesk products outside Support and Guide (Talk, Explore analytics, Sell). Those endpoints aren't covered.

• You need a single shared service account, or static API-token auth. This server supports neither, by design (see below).

What this server does not do

There is no API-token authentication. The server speaks OAuth 2.1 PKCE and nothing else: no ZENDESK_EMAIL + ZENDESK_API_TOKEN (Basic auth) mode, in any transport. That is deliberate, for two reasons.

1. API tokens are insufficiently secure. A Zendesk API token is a long-lived, static, shared secret that carries the full rights of the user who issued it. There is no per-user scoping, no short expiry, and no per-user consent or revocation. OAuth 2.1 PKCE issues per-user, revocable tokens instead.

2. API tokens don't scale. A single static credential can't attribute actions to individual users, and it can't be revoked granularly. It also makes a multi-user remote deployment unsafe: over HTTP it would expose the issuing user's rights to every caller.

If you specifically need an API-token or service-account mode (headless CI with a shared account, say), use one of the other Zendesk MCP servers that support it. A few are listed under Inspiration & related projects.

Quick start: local (stdio)

The default shape: one developer, one Zendesk account, OAuth 2.1 PKCE in the browser. You need Node.js >= 20 and a Zendesk instance (Support or Suite).

Install

# Run without installing
npx -y @fruggr/zendesk-mcp-server <your-subdomain>

# Or install globally
npm install -g @fruggr/zendesk-mcp-server
zendesk-mcp-server <your-subdomain>

Signing in needs a Zendesk OAuth client, so register one first (next section).

Zendesk OAuth setup

1. Go to Admin Center → Apps and integrations → APIs → OAuth Clients

2. Create a public client:

   • Identifier: <your-subdomain>_zendesk (or set ZENDESK_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID)

   • Redirect URL: http://localhost:27439/callback (change the port to match ZENDESK_OAUTH_CALLBACK_PORT / --callback-port if you override it; Zendesk accepts several redirect URLs, one per line)

On the first tool call the server starts the sign-in flow: it opens a browser window and returns the authorize URL in a tool message. The call does not block waiting for sign-in, so authenticate in the browser and then retry the request. The token is persisted to an owner-only file and reused across restarts, so you don't authenticate again every time your MCP client respawns the server (path and overrides: ZENDESK_TOKEN_FILE).

MCP client wiring

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "zendesk": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@fruggr/zendesk-mcp-server", "<your-subdomain>", "--mode", "single"]
    }
  }
}

claude mcp add zendesk -- npx -y @fruggr/zendesk-mcp-server <your-subdomain> --mode single

Add to your .vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "zendesk": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@fruggr/zendesk-mcp-server", "<your-subdomain>", "--mode", "single"]
    }
  }
}

Something not working? See Troubleshooting.

Quick start: remote (HTTP)

Experimental. The HTTP transport ships, but it has not yet been exercised end-to-end against a real Zendesk tenant from every MCP client. Local stdio is the supported path.

You can also deploy a private remote MCP server for one Zendesk account, where every MCP client presents its own user's OAuth bearer in Authorization: and the server never sees a shared admin key. The full guide covers OAuth setup, --public-url behind a reverse proxy, per-platform config, the discovery endpoints, MCP client wiring, CORS and what stays the operator's job: docs/http-deployment.md.

Tool surface

Tools are grouped into four namespaces: Tickets, Help Center, Users & Organizations and Search. The server registers them in one of three modes, so you can trade granularity against context budget:

• all: every operation as its own tool, for clients with good tool selection;

• namespace (default): one proxy tool per namespace, a balanced middle ground;

• single: a single zendesk tool, for models with limited tool slots.

Proxies take { "operation": "<tool_name>", "params": { … } } and validate params through the original schema. --namespace, --tool and --read-only filter tools before the proxies are built, so each proxy describes only the operations that survive.

Every tool with its description and its read/write mode: docs/mcp-tools-reference.md. The flags and worked examples: docs/configuration.md.

Help Center context

Beyond tools, the server hands the LLM the structure of your Help Center: the active locales, the category → section tree with IDs, the visibility segments and the permission groups. With those in hand it uses real IDs instead of guessing or fuzzy-matching names. It all arrives through MCP-native channels, namely the instructions blob sent on initialize plus pull-only resources for the topology and for reading (or pinning) individual articles. The resources are fetched with the caller's own token, and clients that don't support resources ignore them silently.

What's exposed, what the promoted-article pre-listing costs in requests, and how to turn each piece off: docs/help-center-context.md.

Configuration

The complete reference for the CLI flags (--mode, --namespace, --read-only, --transport, --public-url, and so on) and the environment variables (ZENDESK_SUBDOMAIN, ZENDESK_TOKEN_FILE, PUBLIC_URL, the attachment-vision caps) lives in docs/configuration.md. Every variable has its own anchor, so you can deep-link a specific setting.

Troubleshooting

Browser not opening during OAuth login, the callback port already in use, having to re-authenticate every time, and Permission denied on the Guide-admin endpoints are covered in docs/troubleshooting.md. Restart with LOG_LEVEL=debug for the full OAuth flow trace.

Development

Setting up the repo, the toolchain, dev mode and how to test a PR branch are covered in CONTRIBUTING.md. Architecture and code-style conventions live in AGENTS.md.

FAQ

Which Zendesk products are supported? Zendesk Support (tickets, users, organizations) and the Help Center / Guide (articles, sections, categories, translations, labels, content tags, segments, attachments). Talk, Explore and Sell are out of scope.

Do I need a Zendesk admin API key? No, and the server doesn't support one. Each user authenticates with their own credentials and the server acts with exactly their permissions (why).

Is it safe to run via npx? Releases are published from CI via npm Trusted Publishing (OIDC), so each version carries a build provenance attestation you can verify on its npm page. No secrets are ever logged by the server.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome, AI-assisted ones included, as long as the human author has read and validated every line. The guide, the author checklist and the review workflow are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Versions follow SemVer and are released automatically from Conventional Commits; the history is in CHANGELOG.md.

Inspiration & related projects

This project was built with reference to:

• The official Zendesk API documentation

• mattcoatsworth/zendesk-mcp-server

• koundinya/zd-mcp-server

License

MIT

Built and maintained by Digital4better for the Fruggr project.