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Hermes (Nous Research)

Connect FeedNest to Hermes, the self-hosted open-source AI agent from Nous Research. Hermes has a built-in MCP client, so no bridge is needed.

Prerequisites

Self-hosted, in-process

Hermes runs locally on your machine (or your own server). It discovers MCP servers at startup and registers their tools automatically. The bearer token you paste into config is the credential for every Hermes session on this instance.

Setup

  1. 1

    Install Hermes

    Follow the official installation guide if you have not already. Hermes is MIT-licensed and ships a one-line installer: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash.

  2. 2

    Open your Hermes config

    Edit ~/.hermes/config.yaml.

  3. 3

    Add the FeedNest server

    Add a mcp_servers.feednest entry with the config below. Replace fn_live_... with your API key.

  4. 4

    Reload MCP servers

    Run /reload-mcp inside Hermes to refresh the tool registry. Restart Hermes if tools still do not appear.

Hermes MCP configuration

~/.hermes/config.yaml

mcp_servers:
  feednest:
    url: "https://mcp.feednest.com"
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer fn_live_..."

Scope tools per agent

FeedNest exposes 25+ tools. To keep your agent focused, use tools.include or tools.exclude to whitelist or blacklist specific tools. See the example below.

Read-only reader agent (example)

Limit Hermes to read-only FeedNest tools

mcp_servers:
  feednest:
    url: "https://mcp.feednest.com"
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer fn_live_..."
    tools:
      include:
        - get_articles
        - get_article
        - get_feeds
        - get_stats
        - get_recently_read
      resources: false
      prompts: false

Single bearer per instance

Hermes sends the same Authorization header on every tool call. If multiple people share a Hermes instance, they share a FeedNest account. For multi-user deployments, run one Hermes process per user, each with its own API key.

Verify your connection

After setup, try one of these prompts to confirm everything is working:

  • →“What are my unread articles?”
  • →“Summarize my latest saved articles”
  • →“How many feeds am I subscribed to?”

Troubleshooting

Tools do not appear after editing config

Run `/reload-mcp` inside Hermes. If that does not work, fully restart the process. Hermes reads `~/.hermes/config.yaml` at startup.

401 Unauthorized on every tool call

Check that the header value is `Bearer fn_live_...` with a single space between `Bearer` and your key. YAML is whitespace-sensitive. Wrap the value in double quotes.

Server stays disabled

Set `enabled: true` on the server entry (it is the default, but a stale `enabled: false` elsewhere in the file can override it). Check the Hermes startup log for parse errors.

Connection times out

FeedNest MCP is HTTPS-only. If Hermes runs behind a corporate proxy, set `timeout` and `connect_timeout` higher, or route through the proxy.

For more help, see the general setup guide.