Add Option for Claude Code <> Supabase: Read-Only Actions Instead of Read and Write, all-or-nothing

[DannyVojcak]

Right now, when attempting to connect Claude Code to Supabase MCP, it's all or nothing. I either give Claude full read + write access, or deny it access entirely. It would be strongly preferred to have an option to select read-only options and not enable writing actions. This can help avoid destructive, large blast-radius unintended changes.

[zaniluca]

Yeah, totally agree with you on the permissions thing, it's all or nothing right now which isn't ideal for safety.

By the way, I noticed there's a read_only=true flag you can use with the endpoint:

https://mcp.supabase.com/mcp?read_only=true

Not sure if that's already well-known or if it fully solves your concern, but worth checking out!

[gregnr]

Thanks for the feedback @DannyVojcak and @zaniluca. I agree that the all-or-nothing permission logic isn't great. Right now MCP uses the same OAuth server as the rest of our platform, so fine-grain scoping is a bigger change to roll out. Good news is that this is on the road map now!

@zaniluca is right that the read_only=true param accomplishes the same thing. Regardless of the scopes attached to your token, read_only=true will always be respected at take precedence. Still though, I agree that it's confusing and less secure to give the token more scopes that you need. To address this, we rolled out an update that automatically narrows the requested scopes during OAuth consent to only read-only scopes if the read_only=true param was passed. This means that the permissions attached to the token are properly read-only along with the read_only=true param. If you update to the latest version of Claude Code and re-auth, you should see this.