MCP server keeps trying to re-auth while I'm away and then timing out

English Forum Developers & API
1

Hi there, I’ve had the aforementioned problem quite a few times since I started dabbling with the MCP server (the day it came back online after the recent maintenance).

What appears to be happening is that, sometime overnight when I’m not at my computer, the MCP server is re-requesting authorisation and opening up the browser page that does this. Then when I get back to my computer, the page doesn’t actually work to re-auth the server, presumably because the request has long since timed out. When I then try to use the MCP server, every tool use just hangs and eventually times out; it doesn’t open the auth page in the browser again.

I have managed to work around this by manually deleting the ~/.mcp-auth directory (I’m on Mac) which then correctly opens the auth page on the next use, and things work fine from there.

OS: MacOS Sequoia 15.5 (24F74)
IDE: Cursor 1.1.3
MCP configuration:

    [...]
    "asana": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://mcp.asana.com/sse"
      ]
    },
    [...]

I tried to find a bug reporting area but this is the closest thing I could find, so here you go.

1 Like
2

Hello @Fane - Welcome to our community forum!

I’ve gone ahead and moved your post into our Developers/API category and also labeled this post as a bug.

Thank you!

1 Like
3

Facing same issue, Is there any fix or workaround for this?

5

Where are we with this? @Alex_Christensen could you post a link to where you moved this post to?

6

Hi everyone!

This issue appears to be related to the mcp-remote library rather than the Asana MCP server itself. I ran into similar problems when connecting to the MCP server with this tool via npx, and it only worked for me after explicitly specifying the package version (0.1.29).

Since I couldn’t directly reproduce the same issue, my best guess is that it’s either a version-specific bug or related to this GitHub issue. I’d recommend trying the following troubleshooting steps:

  1. Run
    npx mcp-remote https://mcp.asana.com/sse
    and see what happens. If you encounter an error, try explicitly specifying the version, for example:
    npx mcp-remote@0.1.29 https://mcp.asana.com/sse

  2. Remove the ~/.mcp-auth directory and try authenticating again.

  3. Check whether mcp-remote is installed globally and which version you have by running: npm ls -g If it is installed globally, try removing it and then rerun the npx command.

If none of the above helps, it may be best to raise the issue directly with the mcp-remote team on GitHub. Alternatively, feel free to follow up here and I can check with our MCP team to see if they’re aware of anything or have additional recommendations.

Thanks,
Dominik

Asana x Cursor MCP