Skip to main content
The Phrase MCP Server lets an AI assistant work directly with your Phrase data. It can check job status, run quality checks, or start routine work in plain language, without opening Phrase or writing code. Any Phrase account with API access can use it.

​
Connect

No installation, no tokens to manage. You sign in with your existing Phrase account. Prerequisites
  • An active Phrase account with access to the organization you want to connect
  • An MCP-compatible AI tool that supports adding a remote server by URL
1

Register the server

Point your MCP client at the server URL for your region:
  • EU: https://mcp.eu.phrase.com
  • US: https://mcp.us.phrase.com
Check your Phrase account URL (eu.phrase.com or us.phrase.com) if you’re not sure which region you’re on. Exactly how you register a remote server depends on your client. Refer to its documentation for the precise steps. The server supports both Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) and Client Identifier Metadata Document (CIMD) for OAuth client registration.
Use phrase-mcp-prod-us and the US URL if that’s your region.
2

Authorize

Start the authorization flow from your client. Sign in, pick your organization, and choose what to allow: View data, Create data, or Modify and delete data. Your normal Phrase role permissions still apply. This only restricts what you can do, it never expands it. You can change this later.
Run /mcp and select the Phrase server.
3

Confirm it's connected

Ask your assistant to “fetch my most recent Phrase project.”
You can view what you’ve authorized and revoke access anytime from your Phrase profile settings, under the Consents tab. This list is scoped to whichever organization you’re signed into. If you connect to more than one organization, check each one separately. To see or manage consents for a different organization, sign out and back in under that organization first.

​
Access and security

The server acts as the signed-in user, with that user’s existing role permissions in each Phrase product. There is no service account. The assistant can never see or do more than the user could in the product itself.
The server doesn’t keep the AI client’s prompts or conversation history, and it doesn’t store the content of API responses. Phrase keeps technical request logs to operate and secure the service. They record that a call happened (time, product, type of operation, endpoint, permission level, outcome), not the request or response content. Endpoint paths can include identifiers of the records involved. Files transferred through the server are held temporarily and then expire.Changes made through the server are stored as normal Phrase data, attributed to the signed-in user, and appear in the product’s usual history. Operational logs aren’t currently available to customers as an audit trail.

​
Connect a custom client

Most users never need this section. If you build your own MCP client or run an AI gateway, use the details below instead of a client’s built-in setup.

​
Endpoint and transport

  • The server uses Streamable HTTP, with JSON-RPC 2.0 over POST. It is stateless: there is no session ID, and every request is self-contained. Responses are plain JSON, not an event stream.
  • Send Authorization: Bearer <token> and Content-Type: application/json. The Accept header must include application/json. text/event-stream isn’t required.
  • MCP-Protocol-Version is optional. If you send it, it must be a version the server supports, or the request is rejected with a 400 error.
  • Every request needs a token, including tools/list. An anonymous call returns 401. The tool list is filtered per user based on their consent level, so run tool discovery with each user’s token, and cache per user or per consent level.
  • The server applies no rate limit of its own. Calls pass through to the product APIs (for example Phrase Strings and Phrase TMS), whose rate limits apply and can return 429. Retry with exponential backoff.

​
Authorization

The server uses the Phrase Platform authorization server, not a product-specific OAuth registration such as the one used for the Phrase TMS API. Read the authorization and token endpoints from the server’s discovery metadata instead of hardcoding them.
  • Client registration: besides Dynamic Client Registration and Client Identifier Metadata Document, Phrase can register a public client for you, with Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE) enabled, no client secret, and your exact redirect URI.
  • PKCE: the S256 challenge method is supported and recommended. For public clients PKCE is effectively required.
  • Client authentication: a public client sends only client_id on the token request, with no client_secret. The discovery metadata lists only client_secret_post as a token authentication method, but none works. If your library validates against the metadata, set it explicitly.
  • Resource: send resource=https://mcp.eu.phrase.com (or https://mcp.us.phrase.com) on the authorization request. This is the server’s base URI, without a path. Don’t send audience.
  • Scopes: request phrase-mcp:read, phrase-mcp:write, and phrase-mcp:destructive as needed, for example phrase-mcp:read alone for read-only use. Don’t request offline_access or a bare read, which are rejected. A refresh token is issued without them. The user’s consent level and product role limit access further.
  • Token lifetimes: access tokens last 4 hours. Refresh tokens last 30 days and are rotated: each refresh returns a new refresh token and invalidates the old one, so always store the new one.

​
Troubleshooting

The sign-in didn’t complete. Restart the authorization flow from your client and try again.
Confirm the server shows as connected in your client.
The scopes you granted at authorization limit what the assistant can do. Your Phrase role permissions still apply in addition to them, not instead of them. Check what you allowed when you connected.

​
What’s next

Once you’re connected, head to Starter prompts to see what to try first.

​
Local install (deprecated)

Before the hosted server above, the Phrase MCP Server was a self-hosted, open-source package you ran yourself with your own API tokens. It’s still available for teams already using it, but the connect flow above is now the recommended way to get started. Setup, configuration, and troubleshooting for the local install live in the phrase/phrase-mcp-server README.