GitLab MCP Server - Failed to connect to private gitlab host

[tmaoz-nexxen]

Describe the bug
The GitLab MCP server fails to connect to a private GitLab instance despite correct configuration. When attempting to use the MCP to interact with repositories, it returns "failed to create client" errors, even though direct API calls using curl with the same credentials work correctly.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Configure the GitLab MCP server in .cursor/mcp.json with the correct API URL and token
2. Try to use the MCP to search for repositories or access project information
3. Receive "failed to create client" error

We also tried running the MCP server directly from the command line with the same environment variables, but encountered the same issue.

We also tried an alternative implementation with @zereight/mcp-gitlab, but this also failed to connect properly.

Expected behavior
The GitLab MCP server should successfully connect to the private GitLab instance and allow operations like searching for repositories, accessing project information, and performing other GitLab API operations.

Logs
When attempting to use the MCP, we receive errors like:

"error":"MCP error -32603: Invalid arguments: items.0.owner: Required, items.0.fork: Required..."

And when trying to get file contents:

"error":"MCP error -32603: GitLab API error: Not Found"

However, direct API calls using curl with the same credentials work perfectly.

Additional context
The issue appears to be with how the MCP server handles the API responses from the private GitLab instance. The error suggests that the MCP server expects certain fields (owner and fork) to be present in the response items, but they might be missing or have a different structure in our private GitLab instance.

[erreib]

Had a bunch of similar errors trying to connect to my private gitlab from cline using mcp. I just had cline start to build an alternate plugin and it seems to work beter so far for listing and viewing repos.

[francovp]

The Invalid arguments: items.0.owner: Required, items.0.fork: Required... error is the same as reported in #357 and the fix is this PR #721

[francovp]

#721 got merged and this should be fixed now

[olaservo]

Thanks for reporting this. This server has been moved to the archived repository at https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers-archived to reduce maintenance overhead, so we can focus our efforts on a smaller set of core servers.
Since this server is no longer actively maintained, we recommend checking out the alternatives listed in the Readme.