atlassian-browser-mcp
MCP server that wraps the upstream mcp-atlassian toolset with browser-cookie authentication via Playwright. Designed for Atlassian Server/Data Center instances behind corporate SSO (Okta, SAML, etc.) where API tokens are not available.
How it works
Authentication and serving are two separate processes — this is what keeps the MCP server from hanging:
- Authenticate with the CLI (foreground, where a browser can open):
atlassian-cli login <jira|confluence>runs Playwright, you complete SSO/MFA once, and cookies are saved to a per-service storage-state file. - The MCP server serves data only. It reads the saved cookies via a custom
requests.Sessionsubclass and never opens a browser. On a missing/expired session it fails fast with anAuthRequiredErrortelling you to run the CLI login — it does not block waiting for an interactive login.
⚠️ Earlier versions launched the login browser from inside the server. Because the server is detached and async, that blocked tool calls for minutes (often forever) and could deadlock Playwright's sync API on the event loop. The CLI/server split (
allow_interactive=Falseon server sessions) removes that failure mode entirely.
