This PR introduces client-side OAuth support.
# Overall design philosophy
The main new interface introduced to support client-side OAuth is the
`OAuthHandler`. Contrary to its counter-parts in some other SDKs, it is
intentionally small and generic so that it can support most of the OAuth
authorization flow variants. The main `mcp` package purposefully
delegates almost all auth handling to `OAuthHandler` implementations.
This way, the `mcp` package continues to be largely OAuth agnostic.
The `auth` package comes with a default `OAuthHandler` implementation –
`AuthorizationCodeHandler`, which implements the authorization flow
for the `authorization_code` grant type, as defined in the [MCP
specification](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/basic/authorization).
It is expected that the `OAuthHandler` implementation granularity will
be roughly per grant type, as this parameter influences the
authorization flow the most.
# Detailed design
## `OAuthHandler` (auth/client.go)
The main interface for the integration consists of two methods:
```go
type OAuthHandler interface {
// TokenSource returns a token source to be used for outgoing requests.
// Returned token source might be nil. In that case, the transport will not
// add any authorization headers to the request.
TokenSource(context.Context) (oauth2.TokenSource, error)
// Authorize is called when an HTTP request results in an error that may
// be addressed by the authorization flow (currently 401 Unauthorized and 403 Forbidden).
// It is responsible for performing the OAuth flow to obtain an access token.
// The arguments are the request that failed and the response that was received for it.
// The headers of the request are available, but the body will have already been consumed
// when Authorize is called.
// If the returned error is nil, TokenSource is expected to return a non-nil token source.
// After a successful call to Authorize, the HTTP request will be retried by the transport.
// The function is responsible for closing the response body.
Authorize(context.Context, *http.Request, *http.Response) error
}
```
`StreamableClientTransport` accepts this interface as a field and uses
the `TokenSource` method to add an `Authorization: Bearer` header to
outgoing requests to the MCP server. If the request fails with `401:
Unauthorized` or `403: Forbidden`, the transport calls `Authorize` to
perform the authorization flow. If `Authorize` returns a non-nil error,
the request is retried once. `Authorize` errors do not result in
termination of the client session (unless they happen during
connection initialization), as some OAuth flows are multi-legged and it should be
acceptable to retry for example when the authorization grant was
received.
*Note:* There was already an `OAuthHandler` type defined as part of a
previous iteration of OAuth support. It was renamed to
`OAuthHandlerLegacy`. This is the only backwards incompatible API change
in the experimental client `auth` part (protected by the
`mcp_go_client_oauth` Go build tag). The cost of replacing previous
usages is deemed worthwhile to maintain clear naming, under the
assumption that the experimental client `auth` part was not widely used.
## `AuthorizationCodeHandler` (auth/authorization_code.go)
This is the `OAuthHandler` implementation that fulfills the [MCP
specification](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/basic/authorization).
In particular, in supports:
- Protected Resource Metadata discovery and fetching
- Authorization Server Metadata discovery and fetching
- Client registration
- OpenID Connect metadata document
- Pre-registration
- Dynamic Client Registration
- PKCE
- `client_secret_post`, `client_secret_basic` token endpoint
auth methods
- Automatic refresh of tokens
### Authorization Server redirect
As part of the flow for the `authorization_code` grant type, the client
needs to point the user to the authorization URL, so that they confirm
the access request. This design proposes that it will be supported via a
pluggable dependency that will initiate this process in an
application-specific way:
```go
type AuthorizationCodeHandler struct {
...
// AuthorizationCodeFetcher is a required function called to initiate the authorization flow.
// It is responsible for opening the URL in a browser for the user to start the authorization process.
// It should return the authorization code and state once the Authorization Server
// redirects back to the RedirectURL.
AuthorizationCodeFetcher func(ctx context.Context, args *AuthorizationArgs) (*AuthorizationResult, error)
...
}
```
The function is supposed perform any application specific logic to handle the redirect
from the Authorization Server and return the resulting code and state.
## `oauthex` changes
Some additional/adjusted building blocks that may be useful when
creating `OAuthHandler` implementations are present in the `oauthex`
package:
- `auth_meta.go`: Authorization Server Metadata utilities:
- `GetAuthServerMeta`: get Authorization Server Metadata from a URL
- `dcr.go`: Dynamic Client Registration utilities (unchanged)
- `resource_meta.go`: Protected Resource Metadata utilities:
- `GetProtectedResourceMetadata`: get Protected Resource Metadata from a
URL
- `ParseWWWAuthenticate` – as per name (unchanged)
- [deprecated] `GetProtectedResourceMetadataFromID` and
`GetProtectedResourceMetadataFromHeader` in favor of more generic
`GetProtectedResourceMetadata`. They will be kept under the Go build tag
and removed one version of the SDK in the future.
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