Core concepts

Workspaces

A workspace is the unit of isolation: it owns your connections, tools, knowledge, API keys, and billing. Its slug determines your endpoint URL. Most teams need exactly one.

MCP endpoint

Every workspace exposes one managed MCP endpoint over streamable HTTP:

https://your-workspace.protobox.app/mcp

Clients authenticate with a workspace API key in the X-API-Key header. Whatever tools, knowledge, and skills the workspace enables are what connected clients see — one place to configure, every client updated.

Tools

Tools are the actions your AI can take. They come from two sources:

• Integrations — apps from the catalog (Slack, HubSpot, Google Workspace, …). Connect an app once (OAuth or API key) and its actions become tools. Catalog apps marked coming soon are visible but not yet connectable.
• Custom tools — your own HTTP endpoints or sandboxed JavaScript, defined in the dashboard, for anything the catalog doesn't cover.

Servers

A server is a named subset of your tools with its own scoped MCP endpoint. Use them to give each client only what it needs — a support assistant gets ticket tools, a coding agent gets repo tools. Without a server, the default endpoint exposes the workspace's enabled tools.

Knowledge

Knowledge is your searchable content: uploaded files, synced URLs, and documents. Connected clients search it through the endpoint (MCP resources), so assistants answer from your material instead of improvising.

Skills

Reusable, parameterized instructions — your playbooks. They are served over the endpoint as MCP prompts (the protocol primitive), so any client that supports prompts can invoke them. A server exposes only the skills you pick for it.

Install skills from GitHub

Point Protobox at any public GitHub repo containing SKILL.md files and install them as skills — no submission process, and no writing them by hand:

protobox skills import https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/skills

The importer walks the repo (or the subpath from a tree URL, or --path) for every SKILL.md, reads its YAML frontmatter (name, description), and installs each as a skill named after name — so name must already be a URL-safe slug ([a-z0-9-]). The installed skill's description carries the source repo, so its origin stays visible wherever the skill appears, including MCP prompts/list.

Re-running the same command later — after the repo changes, or against a different ref/path in it — updates the already-installed skills in place instead of creating duplicates. A file whose frontmatter is missing or malformed is skipped with the reason; everything else in the pack still installs.

protobox skills import <github-url> [--ref <branch|tag|sha>] [--path <repo-relative-path>]

If a skill name collides with one you already have that wasn't installed by this importer — a hand-written skill, or one of Protobox's own default skills — the import skips it rather than overwriting it, and says so in the result.

API keys and secrets

API keys authenticate MCP clients and the CLI/SDK against your workspace; create and revoke them under Manage → API Keys. Secrets store credentials your custom tools need (third-party API keys, tokens) so they never appear in tool definitions or code.