Everything the gateway exposes.
Authentication, the full source catalogue, and what to do when a call fails. Every section is a page with its own URL, so you can link a colleague straight to the part that matters.
What HARBOR Port is
HARBOR Port is a hosted MCP gateway over 18 federal sources and 147 tools, across 19 servers. One server is the account endpoint. Your agent calls one endpoint and reaches procurement records, awards, regulations, statistics and more, without an account at each agency.
The gateway checks your quota, serves from cache where a source license allows it, retries fairly against upstream rate limits, and enforces each source's license conditions before data leaves it. It is not affiliated with any agency, and every agency source remains a proxy for a public API rather than an official channel.
HARBOR Port is the federal data layer of HARBOR Helm. This site is the gateway's own developer documentation; the product story and the two deployment paths are on the Helm page.
The two ways in
Both reach exactly the same catalogue with the same quota. They differ in who holds the credential.
OAuth 2.1 connectors
Add https://port.harborgovcon.com/mcp to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or OpenCode.
Your client discovers the authorization server, opens a browser, and you approve
once. The gateway is its own authorization server, so there is no third party in
the loop and no separate account to create.
Access tokens last an hour and refresh tokens rotate. Revoke a connector at any time from Connectors.
Connect a clientAPI keys
A static bearer key in the Authorization header. Create one per
machine so a single leak costs you one key rather than every environment you run.
Test keys never count against plan quota.
Send it as a header, never in the query string: the MCP authorization specification prohibits access tokens in the URI.
How authentication worksWhere to go next
- Quickstart: one paragraph into your agent, and what a working call looks like.
- Connect a client: step by step for ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, Cursor and OpenCode.
- Source catalogue: all 19 servers, searchable by name or tool.
- Errors: status codes and the tool errors worth recognizing.
- Machine readable: the catalogue as JSON, the server card, and the health endpoint.
Machine-readable surfaces
The machine surfaces behind this documentation, and the two ways to start an agent without reading the docs.
- Catalogue JSON: every server, tool and source as JSON.
- Server card: the MCP discovery artifact.
- Health endpoint: JSON liveness for probes, not a status page.
- Agent prompt: the setup paragraph on the landing page.
- Connect a client: the step-by-step path for the four GUI clients.