boxadm-mcp

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MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that surfaces external file flow from a Box admin's point of view. It reads Box's enterprise event log (admin_logs) to highlight "who shares a lot with the outside" and "which files get accessed from outside" — an early-warning signal for leakage, not a general-purpose file browser.

Documentation: https://shigechika.github.io/boxadm-mcp/

Read-only: it never revokes shares, deletes files, or otherwise mutates anything — it only surfaces risk. This is a different tool from a general-purpose Box file MCP (the official Box MCP, or the claude.ai Box connector): those operate on a user's own files and cannot see enterprise events, which is exactly what this server is for.

Named after the admin-console viewpoint (boxadm = Box admin), sibling of gwsadm-mcp.

Features

Auth model

Two modes, selected via BOX_AUTH_MODE:

• oauth — OAuth 2.0 (user auth). An admin authorizes once in a browser; the refresh token keeps it running unattended after that.
• ccg — Client Credentials Grant (server-to-server). Simpler to run unattended if your Box tenant has an available server-authentication app slot.

admin_logs (enterprise events) is readable in either mode, provided the authorizing/impersonated user is an admin and the app has the Manage enterprise properties scope.

OAuth setup (one-time, by a Box admin)

1. Developer Console → Create Platform App → Custom App → User Authentication (OAuth 2.0)
2. Redirect URI: http://localhost:8787/callback
3. Application Scopes: check Manage enterprise properties (required for admin_logs). Add Read all files and folders too if you also want collaboration/share-link enumeration, and Manage users if you want the get_user lookup (each scope change requires re-consent via boxadm-mcp auth)
4. Enable the app in the Admin Console (unpublished apps are disabled by default under most tenant policies)
5. Note the Client ID / Client Secret
6. First login: set BOX_AUTH_MODE=oauth etc., then run boxadm-mcp auth → authorize in the browser → a token cache is written to ~/.config/boxadm-mcp/token.json (chmod 600)

Setup

# uv
uv pip install boxadm-mcp

# pip
pip install boxadm-mcp

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/shigechika/boxadm-mcp.git
cd boxadm-mcp

# uv
uv sync

# pip
pip install -e .

Configuration

Keep secrets out of .mcp.json (e.g. in a local env file sourced before launch); .mcp.json itself can reference ${BOX_CLIENT_ID}-style variables and be safely committed.

Scope and limits

• Access tools (external_access_events, and the access half of daily_brief) read the enterprise-wide events stream. Hitting max_events sets capped: true (oldest-first scan).
• Exposure (enumeration) tools only see folders visible to the co-admin account (not a guaranteed 100% of the enterprise), plus max_folders/max_depth limits (surfaced via capped). Requires the Read all files and folders scope.
• The scan fans its per-folder lookups out concurrently (BOX_SCAN_CONCURRENCY), since Box has no enterprise-wide collaboration listing — this widens how many folders finish inside a tool-call timeout, but coverage is still bounded by the caps. The read path retries 429 (honoring Retry-After) and transient 5xx with jittered backoff, so a passing throttle recovers instead of degrading coverage; a folder dropped by a per-folder API error that outlasts those retries (e.g. a persistent 403) is counted in fetch_errors: coverage is complete only when capped is false and fetch_errors is 0.
• Enumeration tools share a short-TTL scan memo across calls; public_shared_links skips collaboration calls entirely (optimization).
• get_user reads the enterprise user directory instead — one request, no paging, and structurally not an enumerator (it answers about the login you pass and nothing else). Its capped flag discloses a truncated search, so a found: false from a truncated result reads as inconclusive rather than negative.

DLP tracing (reverse-lookup by accessor)

To answer "what did this external account download": pass created_by_logins (comma-separated logins) to external_access_events. It keeps only that accessor's events and returns per-file detail (matched_events: item id/name, owner, size in bytes+GB, timestamp, event_type, whether it was via a share link).

external_access_events(since_hours=26, created_by_logins="someone@example.com")

• Since the accessor could appear anywhere in the window, a filtered call auto-extends the scan cap to up to 50,000 events (oldest-first) — but only matching events are kept, so memory stays bounded.
• In this mode the response carries events_matched (match count) instead of events_scanned (no running total is kept; use capped to judge coverage). capped: true means the window wasn't fully scanned — raise max_events.
• Box's admin_logs API has no created_by query parameter, so this is a client-side filter (fetch_admin_events(created_by_logins=...)).

One folder's contents (list_folder_items)

An ls, not a cat. Written for a help desk answering a submitted enquiry whose attachments land in a Box folder: instead of a human going to find that folder, the answer names the attachments and links straight to them. File content is never read, and no shared link is ever created — an existing one is reported because it is an exposure finding, not a convenience.

Who uploaded an item is not where you would look for it. For an upload made through a File Request, Box records no user at all: created_by and modified_by both read "Anonymous User", and owned_by is the application's own service account — identical on every row. The only field carrying the submitter is uploader_display_name, and despite its name the value observed in practice was an email address. It is therefore matched as an opaque string (exact, case-insensitive) and never parsed or validated as an address. For a file uploaded by a signed-in user the reverse holds, so created_by is the fallback.

Ordering and time bounds are computed here rather than by Box:

• Box documents sort as the second sort attribute — items order by type first, so a subfolder precedes every file regardless of date. Measured against a real folder, sort=date also matched neither created_at nor modified_at order, so it cannot honestly be presented as "newest".
• since / until are compared as instants, not text. Box stamps items in its own UTC offset while a caller asks in theirs, so a lexicographic comparison is wrong by that difference at every date boundary and silent about it. Both bounds must carry an offset; a bare date is refused rather than guessed.

limit bounds what is RETURNED, not what is searched — a full page is fetched first, so an uploader's item is found even when it is not among the newest. Truncation is disclosed twice over, because they are different truths: returned vs matched is the caller's own limit, while capped means the folder holds more than one page and a miss is inconclusive rather than negative.

Per-account lookup (get_user)

Every other tool reads the event stream or walks folders, so an account with no recent activity cannot be asked about at all. get_user answers directly — "is this account disabled, and is its quota full?" — in one request:

get_user(login="someone@example.com")

login is the account's full Box login (an email address), matched exactly and case-insensitively. That matching is the point, not an implementation detail: Box's underlying filter_term is a prefix search over display name and login, so the endpoint readily returns a colleague whose name starts with the same letters. Only an exact login match lands in user; everything else is counted in other_prefix_hits and never identified. A term that is not email-shaped is refused before the request is made — filter_term has no minimum length, so a one-character term would otherwise return a page of real accounts.

One drift it cannot find: the same person under a second login at another domain. filter_term prefix-matches the whole term, so alice@old.example can never return alice@new.example; that would need a search on the local part alone, which is the directory-wide prefix search this tool refuses by design.

[!NOTE] In oauth mode this endpoint's requirement is verified end-to-end: the app must hold the "Manage users" application scope. Without it /2.0/users answers 403 even when the authorising user is a co-admin who can manage users; with it, 200. Two caveats: the effective permission is still capped by the authorising user's own role, and a scope added in the Developer Console does not reach tokens minted from an existing refresh token — the app must be re-authorised interactively (boxadm-mcp auth) before the new scope takes effect. Under ccg the endpoint remains unverified. A permission failure returns likely_cause saying all of this rather than a bare HTTP status.

Usage

Claude Code (plugin)

This repository doubles as a single-plugin marketplace, so Claude Code can install the server for you:

/plugin marketplace add shigechika/boxadm-mcp
/plugin install boxadm-mcp@boxadm-mcp

The plugin launches uvx boxadm-mcp and reads the same environment variables described in Configuration; export BOX_CLIENT_ID, BOX_CLIENT_SECRET, BOX_ENTERPRISE_ID (ccg mode), and BOX_ALLOWED_DOMAINS before starting Claude Code. The plugin ships with BOX_AUTH_MODE=ccg by default — switch to oauth only after running boxadm-mcp auth once yourself, since the plugin cannot provision that browser step or the resulting token cache file for you.

uvx must be on the PATH of the process that runs Claude Code — a login shell usually has it, but a GUI-launched app may not; install uv system-wide if the plugin fails to start.

Claude Code (manual)

Add to .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "boxadm-mcp": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "boxadm-mcp",
      "env": {
        "BOX_AUTH_MODE": "oauth",
        "BOX_CLIENT_ID": "${BOX_CLIENT_ID:-}",
        "BOX_CLIENT_SECRET": "${BOX_CLIENT_SECRET:-}",
        "BOX_ALLOWED_DOMAINS": "example.com"
      }
    }
  }
}

CLI Options

boxadm-mcp auth       # OAuth first-time login (opens a browser)
boxadm-mcp --version  # Print version and exit
boxadm-mcp            # Start MCP server (STDIO, default)

Development

git clone https://github.com/shigechika/boxadm-mcp.git
cd boxadm-mcp

# uv
uv sync --dev
uv run pytest -v
uv run ruff check .

# pip
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e . && .venv/bin/pip install pytest respx ruff
.venv/bin/pytest -v
.venv/bin/ruff check .

Tests never touch Box — respx mocks the CCG/OAuth token endpoint and the admin_logs/enumeration APIs.

Live smoke test

That isolation is the point of the unit tests, and also their limit: they cannot tell you that a tool has stopped returning real data. scripts/smoke_test.py runs every registered tool against the configured enterprise and fails on empty, malformed or error answers:

# needs the same BOX_* environment variables as the server
uv run python scripts/smoke_test.py
uv run python scripts/smoke_test.py --only shared_links --traceback

• Read-only. Every tool here reads; nothing in Box is changed. A future tool that writes must be listed as state-changing and skipped, and a test enforces that.
• No payloads in the report. Tool names, statuses and row counts only; server-authored error text is redacted too, since Box errors quote the account or item they were asked about.
• Bounded. These tools page the event stream and walk the folder tree, so each probe passes explicit small caps instead of the interactive defaults (5000 events, 150 folders) — enforced by a test that finds the bounding parameters from the source.
• Nothing enterprise-specific in the specs. A test bans address shapes (login, URL, hostname, IPv4, IPv6) and the parameters that carry an account name, because this repository is public. Two literals identify nobody and are allowed: folder id 0, the root folder in every enterprise, and the made-up term get_user is probed with — an account that cannot exist, so the probe asserts the not-found path rather than naming a real person.
• An empty answer passes: no public links and no external collaborators is the desired state, so probes assert the accounting envelope (count, folders_scanned, window_hours) rather than a row count.
• CI enforces the cheap half: a tool registered without a probe spec fails the build (tests/test_smoke_probes.py), so adding a tool forces the question "how would we know it works?".
• scripts/smoke_harness.py is the engine and holds no Box knowledge: it is kept identical across the servers that share it, so fix engine bugs once and sync the file rather than patching this copy.

Releasing

Releases are automated with release-please. Merging Conventional Commits (feat:, fix:, …) to main keeps a release PR open with the next version and changelog. Merging that PR tags vX.Y.Z and publishes a GitHub Release, whose release: published event triggers the release workflow to build and publish to PyPI and the MCP Registry. release-please owns the version in boxadm_mcp/__init__.py and server.json (do not bump them by hand).

[!IMPORTANT] The release-please workflow should be given a repository secret RELEASE_PLEASE_TOKEN (a PAT with contents: write + pull-requests: write). The default GITHUB_TOKEN cannot create the Release that triggers the downstream release workflow (GitHub blocks workflow runs triggered by GITHUB_TOKEN), so without the PAT nothing gets published. The workflow falls back to GITHUB_TOKEN when the secret is unset so PR CI keeps working on forks.

Governance

Because this surfaces what users share, run it as authorized information-security monitoring with a clear purpose, a defined set of viewers, and a retention policy. Most external sharing is legitimate (collaborators, vendors), so treat findings as a risk ranking, not an alert queue — build an allowlist of known-OK sharers over time.

License

MIT