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Canvas API MCP MCP Server

MCP server exposing the Canvas LMS REST API (1,116 endpoints) for AI assistants

Publisher claimed. No tool list reported, and Pod has not connected to this server.

Status

Pod has not dialled Canvas API MCP yet, so everything on this page is what its publisher reported rather than what we observed. Registries describe servers; they do not connect to them. Until a check runs, treat the tool list below as a claim.

Connect

Published as canvas-api-mcp on pypi. Runs locally.

Known issues

35 problems reported by people outside the maintainer team. Issues filed by the project's own owners, members and collaborators are excluded — those are release checklists and internal refactors, not things that will go wrong for you. Showing 12.

Most discussed

Test gap: no boundary test at LOW_QUOTA_THRESHOLD

Found by an adversarial review of the test suite.

client.py throttles when X-Rate-Limit-Remaining drops below LOW_QUOTA_THRESHOLD (100). tests/test_throttle.py covers 42 (throttles) and 600 (doesn't), but nothing at the boundary.

An off-by-one mutation — <= instead of < — would pass the whole suite.

Fix: add cases at exactly 100.0 (must NOT throttle) and 99.9 (must throttle). Mutate the operator locally first and confirm your new test actually catches it.

Rate limiting is

Read the thread · 2026-08-07 · closed · 3 comments

do_read_file's raw file download has no error handling and no test for its no-Authorization-header invariant

What happens

do_read_file in src/canvas_api_mcp/tools/content.py fetches the pre-signed download URL with a fresh, bare httpx.AsyncClient (line 100-102):

# The download URL is pre-signed and must NOT carry the Authorization header.
async with httpx.AsyncClient(timeout=60.0, follow_redirects=True) as raw:
    file_response = await raw.get(download_url)
    file_response.raise_for_status()

Two problems in this exact block:

  1. Unhandled exception. Every other failure

Read the thread · 2026-08-07 · closed · 2 comments

Add --test and --config CLI subcommands for debugging outside an MCP client

Problem

The server only speaks JSON-RPC over stdio, so when it doesn't work there is nothing a user can inspect. They get silence inside a client they can't debug, and no way to answer "is my token even valid?"

Proposal

canvas-api-mcp --test      # call whoami, print the account name and course count
canvas-api-mcp --config    # print resolved config with the token REDACTED

--test should exit non-zero on failure and print the translated error from client.py (which alrea

Read the thread · 2026-08-07 · closed · 2 comments

docs/DESIGN.md is stale: no get_syllabus, no mention of fencing, and 21 documented tools against 19 registered

What is wrong

docs/DESIGN.md describes an older version of this server. Checked against the current tree:

get_syllabus mentioned in DESIGN.md      0 times   (tool exists, shipped in 1.0.0)
safety.py / fencing mentioned            0 times   (the largest architectural
                                                     addition in the project)
tools documented in the table            21
tools actually registered                19

So the document is simultaneously missing things th

Read the thread · 2026-08-12 · closed · 1 comment

read_discussion, get_page, and 7 other read tools return instructor/classmate text unfenced, so course content can act as instructions to the model holding post_discussion_reply and submit_assignment

What happens

None of the 16 curated tools mark instructor- or classmate-authored text as untrusted before handing it back to the model. Every field below is copied straight out of the Canvas JSON response into the tool's return dict, unmodified: no delimiter, no provenance note, no length cap tied to a safety boundary, nothing that would stop the text from being read as an instruction rather than as data.

This server has an equivalent problem to the one solved in `johannsenlum/linkedin-api

Read the thread · 2026-08-10 · closed · 1 comment

Most recent

--config omits CANVAS_TIMEOUT, and nothing stops the next variable going missing too

What is wrong

--config was added in #43 to print the resolved configuration. It reports three variables but the server reads four:

# src/canvas_api_mcp/server.py
def _print_config(config: Config) -> None:
    print(f"CANVAS_BASE_URL: {config.base_url}")
    print(f"CANVAS_TOKEN: {_redact_token(config.token)}")
    print(f"CANVAS_MAX_PAGES: {config.max_pages}")
    # CANVAS_TIMEOUT is missing

Config carries base_url, token, max_pages and timeout. CANVAS_TIMEOUT l

Read the thread · 2026-08-15 · open · 0 comments

No structural test enforces which fields are fenced, so read_file went unfenced since 1.0.0

What is wrong

The linkedin-api-mcp sibling has tests/test_fencing_coverage.py, a structural test that walks every tool module and fails if a prose-shaped field is returned without a fence. This repo has no equivalent, and the consequence is already visible: read_file has been returning unfenced document text since fencing landed in 1.0.0, and it was found by reading code rather than by a failing test.

Every fencing test here names one field:

tests/test_safety.py   test_get_page_fen

[Read the thread](https://github.com/JohannsenLum/canvas-api-mcp/issues/49) · 2026-08-15 · open · 0 comments

### read_file returns extracted document text unfenced, though get_page and get_syllabus fence theirs

## What is wrong

`read_file` extracts text from instructor-uploaded documents (PDF, PPTX, DOCX, plain text)
and returns it with no fencing at all, while its two neighbours in the same module fence
theirs.

`src/canvas_api_mcp/tools/content.py`:

```python
line 75:  "body":          guard(page.get("body"), BODY_LIMIT, "page.body")
line 91:  "syllabus_body": guard(course.get("syllabus_body"), BODY_LIMIT, "syllabus.body")
          "text":          <extracted document text, returned raw>

Demo

Read the thread · 2026-08-15 · open · 0 comments

get_assignment reports partial failure as a 'note' string while whats_due uses a 'warnings' list

What is wrong

This server has two different shapes for "the call mostly worked, but part of it did not", and callers have to know which tool uses which.

do_whats_due collects a list:

# src/canvas_api_mcp/tools/student.py:172 and :212
"warnings": warnings,

backed by _safe_fetch, which catches CanvasError and httpx.HTTPError and appends a formatted message to a caller-supplied warnings: list[str]. The comment there explains why a list matters: whats_due merges thre

Read the thread · 2026-08-12 · closed · 0 comments

Server still negotiates MCP protocol 2025-11-25, blocked on FastMCP allowing mcp>=2

What's wrong

This server negotiates MCP protocol version 2025-11-25. The current specification is 2026-07-28, announced on 2026-07-28.

The cause is upstream, not in this repository. fastmcp currently pins mcp<2, and only mcp>=2.0.0 speaks the new protocol version. Verified:

# this repo's environment
mcp 1.29.0    LATEST_PROTOCOL_VERSION = 2025-11-25

# clean venv
pip install mcp==2.0.0        -> LATEST_PROTOCOL_VERSION

[Read the thread](https://github.com/JohannsenLum/canvas-api-mcp/issues/39) · 2026-08-10 · open · 0 comments

### The 30 second HTTP timeout is hardcoded, with no CANVAS_TIMEOUT variable to raise or lower it

## What's wrong

`CanvasClient.__init__` constructs its `httpx.AsyncClient` with a fixed `timeout=30.0` (`src/canvas_api_mcp/client.py:164`):

```python
self._client = httpx.AsyncClient(
    base_url=config.base_url,
    headers={...},
    timeout=30.0,
    transport=transport,
    follow_redirects=True,
)

There is no way to change this without editing source. Contrast this with CANVAS_MAX_PAGES, which is exactly this kind of tunable and already has a full env-var pattern in `src/canvas_a

Read the thread · 2026-08-10 · closed · 0 comments

list_files, list_assignments, and four other tools drop the pagination truncation flag, hiding incomplete results

What's wrong

CanvasClient.request already computes whether a paginated response was cut short. CanvasResponse (src/canvas_api_mcp/client.py:48) carries a truncated: bool field, and the pagination loop sets it to True when the next page's Link header points off-origin or when CANVAS_MAX_PAGES is reached (client.py:318, :321; default 10, each page up to 100 records, so a hard cap around 1,000 records per call).

Exactly one tool surfaces this. do_request in gateway.py retur

Read the thread · 2026-08-10 · open · 0 comments

See all 19 reports Pod holds for Canvas API MCP — of 35 qualified upstream.

Firsthand observations

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