Connecting your tools

Everything a client does against hosted Spor goes through api.sporhq.io (REST, for the CLI and mechanical writers) or mcp.sporhq.io (MCP, for AI hosts like claude.ai). Connecting a tool means giving it a credential and one of those two addresses.

The CLI

Getting a credential onto a machine — spor join with a pasted invite token, or an interactive spor auth login — and confirming it with spor whoami is covered step by step in I was invited to hosted Spor. This section covers what carries across every machine and organization you connect, rather than that first walkthrough.

Under the hood, both paths write the client configuration as three environment variables, which you can also set directly (CI does):

SPOR_SERVER=https://api.sporhq.io      # where the graph lives
SPOR_TOKEN=spor_pat_...                # your credential
SPOR_ORG=tidefall                      # which stored credential is active

Credentials are keyed by (server, org), so joining a second organization adds a credential rather than overwriting the first, and SPOR_ORG (or spor whoami --all) tells you which one is active. See Organizations and sign-in for switching between them, and Configuration for the full cascade these variables sit in.

One thing that surprises people: setting SPOR_SERVER globally does not make every repository on your machine start writing to the team graph. Spor is opt-in per repository — a repo participates only once it is explicitly enabled (spor enable), so a side project never distills into the team’s graph by accident.

The claude.ai connector

Add mcp.sporhq.io as a connector in claude.ai (or any MCP host that speaks Streamable HTTP). The host walks you through an OAuth authorization against auth.sporhq.io; the resulting grant is tied to your identity, so everything the assistant writes through the connector is attributed to you. Tool-level detail — what each MCP tool does and the interactive queue and lens views — is in the MCP section.

Check it worked

For the CLI, run:

spor status

Expect health: OK with a node count and an identity: line naming you. The full expected output, the per-repo (not enabled here …) note, and what each failure (AUTH FAILED, OFFLINE, a hang) means are walked through in I was invited to hosted Spor.

For the connector, ask the assistant for your Spor queue and expect a tool call that returns ranked items. The step-by-step check is in Connect an assistant.

Next step: use the teammate first-day pointer below when you are setting up someone else.

A teammate’s first day

Setting someone else up? Point them at I was invited to hosted Spor — it is the full walkthrough: join or sign in, verify identity, make a first capture, and enable a repo. The one thing that has to happen on your side first is the invitation — a team admin invites them, so they have something to sign in to.

Optionally, they can also add the connector; see Connect an assistant. After that there is no other hosted-specific step — the Start here material applies as written.

What the server can see once repos are enabled and the connector is added — and how all of it can be exported — is stated in Data, privacy, and export.