Gotchas

Why are PUBLIC_URL and DASHBOARD_URL required?

They are not decoration, and they are not us being fussy about config.

• PUBLIC_URL becomes the OpenAPI servers entry — the address Muse is told to call.
• DASHBOARD_URL is printed to users in llms.txt and in every 401 — the place you tell them to go and revoke access.

A default would mean a half-configured deploy points Muse, and your users, at somebody else's website. So the connector refuses to start and tells you why:

[muse-connector] PUBLIC_URL is required — it is the address Muse is told to call,
and goes in the OpenAPI servers entry

Other rules the config enforces:

Rule	Why
CONNECTOR_SECRET ≥32 chars	A short HMAC key is not worth using
URLs must be absolute	A relative value cannot go in servers
https required, except localhost	Muse runs in a remote VM and will not call plain http
Trailing slashes stripped	Otherwise concatenated paths break

Do I need a subdomain?

No. Any public HTTPS URL works. See Deploy → Do I need a subdomain?.

Does this need MCP?

No. Muse's custom connectors work over plain REST plus an OpenAPI document.

MCP is a different protocol, and it belongs to a different product: Muse Code, Meta's terminal coding agent, does support MCP (via mcpServers in ~/.config/muse/settings.json). That is not this.

A lot of the confusion online comes from conflating the two.

What if the model calls something at the wrong time?

Every call goes through Meta's permission layer, which can allow, deny, or ask the user. You do not control that decision — you control how legible the request is to it.

Three fields do that work:

• summary — one imperative line
• description — say what it does and what it does not do
• spends — say out loud that it costs money

The connector works but Muse never calls it

Almost always one of:

1. A vague summary. The model matches user intent against your text. "Get jobs" is weaker than "Check the progress of a video generation that was already started."
2. The operation is not in the registry. Check curl -s localhost:8787/openapi.json | jq '.paths | keys'.
3. The spec is not reachable. Muse fetches /openapi.json from your PUBLIC_URL. Confirm it is publicly reachable over https — and that your WAF is not blocking non-browser traffic.

Everything says 401

In order of likelihood:

1. The user revoked the connection, or it never existed in this store.
2. CONNECTOR_SECRET was rotated, which invalidates every token.
3. You are running a serverless deploy without KV, and the request landed on an isolate that has never seen that connection. This is the memory-store failure mode — see Deploy.

Can I use this without Muse at all?

Yes. It is an authenticated OpenAPI service with a token-minting endpoint. Point any agent at it — that generality is deliberate.

Is it really Apache-2.0?

Yes. Fork it, rename it, strip the branding. Keep the NOTICE file for the files you redistribute. Your deployed service does not need to credit anyone.