MCP server won't connect to HTTP Portainer

[pbarone]

Running into a weird issue with the Portainer MCP server and hoping someone can help me out.

What's happening

I've got Portainer running on HTTP. The MCP server just refuses to connect via HTTP though - it keeps forcing HTTPS connections.

My setup

• Portainer MCP Server: v0.6.0
• Portainer: Running on HTTP at 192.168.1.100:9000 (works fine with curl)
• Using it with Amazon Q CLI

Config I'm using

json
{
 "mcpServers": {
   "portainer": {
     "command": "/path/to/portainer-mcp",
     "args": [
       "-server",
       "192.168.1.100:9000",
       "-token",
       "ptr_xxx",
       "-tools",
       "/tmp/tools.yaml"
     ]
   }
 }
}

The errors I'm getting

failed to get Portainer server version: Get "https://192.168.1.100:9000/api/system/status": http: server gave HTTP response to HTTPS client

What I've tried

• Double-checked that Portainer is actually responding (it is - curl http://192.168.1.100:9000/api/system/status works perfectly)
• Restarted everything multiple times

Seems like the MCP server is either mangling the URL or just defaulting to HTTPS regardless of what I specify. Any ideas? Would love a flag like -insecure or something to force HTTP if that's easier than fixing the URL parsing.

Thanks in advance!

[deviantony]

Hey @pbarone - this is the expected behavior and I'm not super fan of enabling support for HTTP. These days, all Portainer instances default to HTTPS and it should be the way to run your Portainer server.

The MCP server uses the GO SDK for Portainer, which defaults to HTTPS: https://github.com/portainer/client-api-go/blob/main/client/client.go#L70

[handonam]

imo this is a bit naive and lazy. There should be support for HTTP so that we can experiment. It's a hurdle for us to start having to setup for HTTPS

[deviantony]

@handonam can I get more details about your HTTP use case? Nowadays Portainer default to self-signed HTTPS on port 9443 anyway so it should not create any friction on your side.