Two related issues made the connected MCP server return a bare "Internal
server error" for tools that need real Gitea API access (e.g.
list_repositories), while public-repo-by-path reads worked:
1. Gitea OIDC access tokens only carry openid/profile/email and cannot call
the repository REST API, so pure-OAuth mode fails for most tools. A service
PAT (GITEA_TOKEN) is required in practice; per-user permission is still
enforced before each call, so this does not weaken authorization.
2. The tool handlers caught GiteaError broadly and re-raised it as RuntimeError.
Because GiteaAuthenticationError/GiteaAuthorizationError subclass GiteaError,
a clean 401/403 was masked as a generic internal error and the server's
re-authorization guidance never fired.
Changes:
- read_tools.py / repository.py / write_tools.py: re-raise the auth/authz
subclasses before the broad GiteaError catch so server.py returns actionable
guidance instead of a generic 500.
- .env.example + README.md: document GITEA_TOKEN as a least-privilege bot PAT,
explain why it's needed and that OAuth remains authoritative, and note that
list_repositories is intentionally unavailable in service-PAT mode.
- tests: assert tool handlers propagate auth errors unwrapped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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