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Learning Outcomes
  • Understand why ChatGPT on the web has no self-serve connection today.
  • Know what a workspace administrator can do instead.
  • Pick a supported assistant if you need this working now.

ChatGPT web

No self-serve path today

There is no button to connect ChatGPT on the web to your Foundry Connect instance. This page explains why, so nobody spends an afternoon looking for one.

Why the usual routes do not apply

ChatGPT does not read a configuration file on your machine the way the command line assistants do, so there is nowhere for you to enter your instance address. The two routes that do exist both need a relationship with OpenAI rather than anything you can set up yourself:

  • The public plugin directory expects a single fixed address that works for everyone. Foundry Connect is deployed per organization, so no such address exists. Per-customer template addresses are possible, but they are granted only to developers with an established OpenAI relationship, and every update carries review obligations. The obstacles here are commercial, not technical.
  • A registered connection is named inside a plugin by an opaque identifier that OpenAI issues. A plugin cannot point one at your own host unless OpenAI registers it first, so this needs the same relationship.

What a workspace administrator can do

A ChatGPT workspace administrator can import and sync a GitHub marketplace privately for their team. That needs no directory submission and suits a single organization well.

The catch is the address. The published plugin declares its server as https://${instance_host}/mcp, and OpenAI hosts store that address exactly as written, without filling in the variable. An imported copy would therefore carry an unusable placeholder.

The workaround, which has not been tested, is to fork the plugin repository and replace the templated address with your own hostname before importing, in plugins/foundry-connect/.mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "foundry": {
      "url": "https://foundry.your-org.edu/mcp"
    }
  }
}

That means one fork per organization, which is exactly what the templating was meant to avoid, but it is contained when the workspace and the Foundry Connect instance belong to the same organization anyway.

If you try this, please tell us what happened so this page can stop saying "untested".

What to use instead today

See also