Support `Authorization` headers for authentication

[johnthagen]

The MCP servers we connect the agent require to Authorization headers (that are internally forwarded on to other API backends behind them). This allows a user to pass Basic / Bearer etc authentication/tokens in a header out of band to authenticate requests.

The key here is that for authorization, this needs to be "per user" and collected in the browser rather than something hard-coded into custom Pydantic AI agent configuration.

It would be great if ai-chat-ui supported an optional "login" prompt that would allow setting common authentication headers (e.g, Basic Auth and Bearer Auth) that would be sent to HTTP MCPToolsets.

Existing Art

Codex

Codex supports adding headers to queries to HTTP MCP servers

OpenCode

OpenCode supports adding headers to MCP server requests

• https://opencode.ai/docs/mcp-servers/#remote

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "mcp": {
    "my-remote-mcp": {
      "type": "remote",
      "url": "https://my-mcp-server.com",
      "enabled": true,
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer MY_API_KEY"
      }
    }
  }

Swagger UI

This is similar to how Swagger UI exposed authentication options in its user-friendly REST API development pages.

[johnthagen]

@dsfaccini Is this something that would be in scope for this project? Now that offline hosting is completed, this issue is the last thing we need before we can really put ai-chat-ui into place everywhere we'd like.

[dsfaccini]

hey @johnthagen I don't have anything against this. I'd try to be a bit more broad and support the different types of auth people expected from a chat UI. let me get codex on this