Quickstart

Midplane puts a safety layer between your agent and your Postgres database. Stand it up two ways: Cloud (hosted, fastest) or self-host (your own infrastructure, one Docker command). Either way, by the end you’ll have a protected MCP endpoint.

Cloud
Self-host

Go to app.midplane.ai and create an account with email and password, or Google.

Choose a region

Pick EU or US — it sets where your credentials and audit log live.

Your region is immutable — chosen once at sign-up, and every project inherits it. Pick the jurisdiction your data needs to stay in.

Connect Postgres

Every account starts with an empty Default project — an MCP endpoint fronting one or more databases. Click Connect Postgres and paste a connection string. Give Midplane a scoped, least-privilege role, not a superuser DSN. Pick a default access level and leave it at read to stay read-only; grant writes per table later.No database handy? Click Try the sample database to load a hosted, read-only demo Postgres in one click and watch an agent query through Midplane.

Connect your agent

Your project has a stable HTTPS endpoint, https://{eu|us}.midplane.ai/mcp. Paste it into your agent’s MCP config — you connect over tokenless OAuth (register, sign in once, no secret to copy), and Cursor, Claude Code, and Claude Desktop all connect the standard way. See connect your agent.

For CI or headless callers, mint a machine token instead — that token is a secret, shown only once. See tokens.

Prerequisite: Docker (with Compose v2) — the only one.The fastest way is to let the coding agent on this machine boot it. Paste this — it runs the two commands, then hands the security-sensitive choices (the secret backup, the database role) back to you rather than deciding them:

Setup prompt

Set up a local Midplane self-host deployment on this machine.

1. Clone https://github.com/midplaneai/midplane, then from the repo root run
   `./bin/self-host up`. Show me the output and the dashboard URL it prints —
   normally http://localhost:3000, or the next free port if 3000 is busy (the
   script auto-selects one and keeps BETTER_AUTH_URL matching). If the bundled
   Postgres port 5432 is taken, set POSTGRES_PORT to a free port in the
   generated .env.self-host and re-run.
2. The command generates `.env.self-host` with fresh secrets. Don't edit,
   rotate, or regenerate any value in it. Once the stack is up, tell me to back
   that file up somewhere safe: its KMS key and token pepper encrypt every
   stored credential, so losing or changing them is unrecoverable.
3. Then stop and hand back to me — I'll open http://localhost:3000, sign up
   (the first email becomes the owner), and connect my Postgres with a scoped,
   least-privilege role. Don't enter database credentials for me.

Prefer to run the commands yourself? Here’s each step:

Clone and run

git clone https://github.com/midplaneai/midplane && cd midplane
./bin/self-host up            # → dashboard at http://localhost:3000

One command creates .env.self-host with generated secrets, pulls the image, and brings up Postgres and the dashboard. MIDPLANE_SELF_HOST=1 is preset; see the deploy guide for every variable and run method.

Back up .env.self-host and never rotate its secrets once data exists — the KMS key encrypts project DSNs and the token pepper backs machine tokens, so regenerating either bricks every stored credential. The script never regenerates a value that’s already set.

Open http://localhost:3000 and sign up once — the first email + password becomes the owner. Then connect a Postgres database to create your first project. Give it a scoped, least-privilege role; Midplane encrypts the DSN with your local key. Pick a starting table access level (read by default).

Inside the container, localhost is the container. For a Postgres on your host, use host.docker.internal (Docker Desktop) in the DSN, or put the database on the same Docker network.

Connect your agent

Point your agent at the project’s /mcp endpoint on http://localhost:3000, over the dashboard’s OAuth flow — or mint a machine token for headless callers. See connect your agent.

Claude Desktop rejects http://localhost (it requires HTTPS) — use the mcp-remote shim, shown in the per-agent guide. Cursor and Claude Code connect to the localhost URL directly.

Try it

Ask your agent to list the tables in your database — an allowed read that goes straight through. Now ask it to change a single row in one of those tables. The agent issues a bounded UPDATE … WHERE, and Midplane denies it before it runs: under the table_access rule, writes deny by default — even a one-row, surgical change — until you grant read_write on that table. Nothing is modified, and the attempt is audited. Open the audit log in the dashboard: both events are there — the allowed read and the denied write, each tagged with the rule that decided it, and the denial recorded before the query would have run. See the audit trail.

Next steps

Connect your agent

Verified MCP configs for Cursor, Claude Code, and Claude Desktop.

Write a policy

Grant the reads and writes your agent actually needs.

Cloud vs self-host

Which to run, and how they compare.

Get started

Core concepts

Connect your agent

Writing policies

Cloud

Self-host

Security

Resources

Try it

Next steps

Connect your agent

Write a policy

Cloud vs self-host

​Try it

​Next steps

Connect your agent

Write a policy

Cloud vs self-host

Try it

Next steps