Consent gates
Reading is available on sign-in. Changing a live store requires the merchant to turn on a specific switch — deliberately, in config, with a restart.
The three gates
| Environment variable | Unlocks |
|---|---|
MECSTO_MCP_ALLOW_COMMERCE | Listing, category, location and promotion writes — things customers see and pay against. |
MECSTO_MCP_ALLOW_OPERATIONS | Order actions: confirm, cancel, fulfil, reschedule, attendance. Customer-facing and mostly irreversible. |
MECSTO_MCP_ALLOW_PUBLISH | Publishing site content live. Ungated, an agent can still save drafts for the merchant to review. |
How refusal looks
A gated tool refuses before any authentication or network work, and the error names the exact variable to set. An agent gets an actionable message rather than a permission error it might retry around.
Drafts are the ungated escape hatch. Without any gate, an agent can still read everything and create draft listings and draft page content. The merchant reviews and publishes from the Seller App. For most work, that is the right setting to leave it on.
Turning one on
.mcp.json
{
"mcpServers": {
"mecsto": {
"command": "node",
"args": ["/path/to/pages-mcp/src/index.js"],
"env": { "MECSTO_MCP_ALLOW_COMMERCE": "true" }
}
}
}Restart the server. Gates are read at startup, never per-call.