Manage extensions

Extensions are how you give Rational AI new capabilities, most often by connecting it to outside tools your agents can call. This guide walks through everything you do with extensions in the UI: publishing them to the registry, installing them into your tenant, reading what each extension card tells you, and wiring up extensions that reach external services over the network.

📖WHAT IS AN EXTENSION?

An extension is a bundle that adds a capability to Rational AI, most commonly one or more MCP servers. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data sources, so an MCP server is essentially a set of tools your agents can call.

Two distinct steps put an extension to work. Making one available uploads its bundle to a shared registry so anyone can install it. Installing it then adds it into your tenant, where it actually runs. These steps are separate and explicit, so publishing a bundle never silently turns it on for everyone.

📝LOOKING TO BUILD YOUR OWN?

This page covers managing and installing existing extensions. To create one from scratch, including its manifest, see Build an extension.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure you have:

• Administrative access: an account with extension management privileges.
• The extension bundle (only if you're uploading your own): a .tar.bz2, .zip, .mcpb file, or a bare manifest.json. The format is detected automatically.
• Any required configuration values: for remote MCP servers reached over the network, the endpoint URL plus whatever authentication token or header the server expects.

Read an extension card

Every extension appears as a card on the Extensions page, and the card is your at-a-glance status check before you open anything. When an extension declares a version in its manifest, that version appears right next to the extension name, so you can confirm which release is installed without digging into details. Each card also carries an enable toggle for turning the extension on or off.

Make an extension available

Do this when you have a bundle you want others to be able to install. Uploading it adds it to the shared registry only; nothing runs in your tenant yet, and your list of installed extensions stays exactly as it was.

1. Go to Settings → Extensions.
2. Drag an extension bundle from your file system and drop it anywhere on the page. A dashed drop overlay appears while you drag, confirming the page will accept the file.
3. Release the file. A toast confirms the extension is now available in the registry.

📝ACCEPTED FILES AND CONFLICTS

The registry accepts .tar.bz2, .zip, .mcpb, or a bare manifest.json. Dropping anything else shows a warning toast and uploads nothing. Re-uploading a bundle whose name identifier and version already exist surfaces a conflict as an error toast, so you'll know to bump the version first.

You can also publish a bundle without leaving the install flow: drag it directly onto the registry list inside the Add extension dialog. The bundle is added to the registry and the new entry is selected for you automatically, ready to install.

Install an extension into your tenant

This is the step that actually makes an extension usable. Installing pulls an available extension out of the registry and adds it into your tenant.

1. Go to Settings → Extensions and select + Add.
2. In the registry picker, browse the available extensions. The detail pane opens on the first not-yet-installed extension, so it's never blank when the dialog appears.
3. Select the extension you want, then confirm to install it into your tenant.

📝ALREADY-INSTALLED EXTENSIONS STAY VISIBLE

Extensions you've already installed remain in the registry list, shown disabled with an Already installed tag. You can see what's in place at a glance, but you can't re-select or double-install it.

Configure remote (HTTP) MCP servers

Many extensions connect to MCP servers running on your own machine, spawned as a local process. Others reach servers across the network over HTTP, and a single extension can bundle both kinds. Remote servers are the ones that need a little setup, because Rational AI has to know where they live and how to authenticate.

Tell local and remote servers apart

Open the extension's details page and find the MCP servers section. Each server is labelled: a remote server shows a Remote chip alongside its endpoint URL, while a local one shows a Local chip. The same view also lists the tools the extension provides, so you can see at a glance what your agents will be able to call.

An extension’s detail view: the tools it provides and the MCP servers it connects to (local or remote).

Add authentication for a remote server

For a remote server that requires authentication, enter the token or header value in the extension-configuration form. That value comes from your configuration and is never written into the manifest, so credentials stay out of the shared bundle. Headers that resolve to empty are dropped automatically, which means a public, no-auth server is never sent a blank header.

📝READY-MADE REMOTE EXTENSIONS

Rational AI ships ready-to-use remote MCP manifests for many popular connectors, including GitHub, Linear, Atlassian, monday, Airtable, Supabase, Snowflake, Sentry, PagerDuty, and Shopify. Each one just needs an endpoint URL and an authentication header from your configuration. There's also a generic remote-mcp extension for connecting any other remote MCP server: supply its URL and, if needed, an Authorization header.

Result

You can read an extension's version straight from its card, upload bundles to make extensions available in the registry, and install them into your tenant from the Add dialog, where already-installed extensions stay visible but disabled. For extensions with remote MCP servers, you can spot them by the Remote chip and endpoint URL and supply their credentials through the extension-configuration form, all without ever putting a secret into a manifest.