Quickstart
Agent CLIs like Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode are great for building in your terminal directly. With the Anter MCP Server connected, they can create, read, update, and run Anter agents without leaving the command line.
This guide covers the one-time setup. Once it's in place, your MCP client has full access to the Anter Agent Builder API.
What you need
- An organization in the Anter Agent Builder platform
- A project API key, generated from the project settings page
If you don't have these yet, sign in to Anter, create (or open) a project, and generate an API key from its settings — it takes about two minutes.
Configuration
Export your API key
export ANTER_MCP_API_KEY=your-api-key-here
Add this to your shell profile (~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc, etc.) to make it persistent across sessions.
Configure your MCP client
Every Anter MCP connection points at the same remote endpoint and header — only the config file differs by client.
URL: https://api.anter.ai/v1/external/mcp
Header: x-api-key: <your API key>
For OpenCode, add this to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.jsonc:
{
"$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
"mcp": {
"anter": {
"type": "remote",
"url": "https://api.anter.ai/v1/external/mcp",
"headers": {
"x-api-key": "{env:ANTER_MCP_API_KEY}",
},
"oauth": false,
},
},
}
For Claude Code, add a remote server entry to ~/.claude.json (or your project's .mcp.json) under mcpServers:
{
"mcpServers": {
"anter": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://api.anter.ai/v1/external/mcp",
"headers": {
"x-api-key": "${ANTER_MCP_API_KEY}"
}
}
}
}
Any MCP client that supports a remote HTTP (streamable) server can use this same URL and header pattern — point it at the URL above and pass your key as the x-api-key header.
Test the connection
Restart your client, then ask it something simple, like:
"List my Anter projects"
If it's connected correctly, your client will call the list_agent_builder_projects tool and return your projects by name. Some clients also offer a dedicated auth-check command, e.g. opencode mcp auth anter.
Try it out
Once connected, ask your CLI agent things like:
- "Show me the structure of one of my agents"
- "What LLM providers do I have configured?"
- "List the builtin tools available in Anter"
- "Draft a new agent that answers FAQ questions, and create it in project X"
Promotion is dashboard-only
Your MCP client can create drafts, revise specs, and run them for testing — but promoting a draft to live traffic is intentionally a dashboard-only action. See Agent lifecycle tools for the full design-to-run loop.