Connect Claude to Apollo

Authoring a deck by hand is fine. Authoring one by describing it is better. So Apollo now ships an MCP server: connect Claude Code (or Claude Desktop, or Cursor) to your account and you can build slides, launch a live session, and pull post-lecture reports without ever leaving the chat.

MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is the open standard that lets an AI assistant call tools on your behalf. Apollo exposes its authoring surface as a set of those tools, so Claude can drive the same actions you would in the dashboard.

What you can do once it is connected

The server hands Claude thirteen tools, grouped by what they touch:

• Decks — list_decks, get_deck, create_deck, update_deck, delete_deck. Spin up a new presentation from a starter template (blank, lecture, workshop, conference-talk) and edit its settings.
• Slides — add_slide, update_slide, reorder_slides, delete_slide, and get_block_schemas (which teaches Claude every block kind — text, image, mcq, poll, viz, and the rest — before it writes any).
• Sessions — list_questions to read the anonymous questions students asked live. Launching and ending sessions stays in the app — that's the teacher's moment, not Claude's.
• Analytics — list_deck_analytics and get_deck_analytics for the post-lecture report: participation, quiz results, and feedback.

So "draft a five-slide intro to gradient descent with a checkpoint quiz" is a single request.

Add it to Claude Code

Connecting takes about a minute.

1. Sign in, open the avatar menu, and choose Connect Claude — the /teacher/tokens page.
2. Create an API token. It is shown once (stored only as a hash), so copy it right away; you can revoke it from the same page at any time.
3. The page prints a ready-to-paste command with your host and token already filled in. It looks like this:

claude mcp add --transport http apollo https://<your-apollo-host>/api/mcp/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer apollo_pat_..."

That registers a server named apollo pointing at the hosted endpoint (/api/mcp/mcp, over Streamable HTTP), authenticated with your token as a bearer header. Restart Claude Code and the Apollo tools show up.

Prefer Cursor or Claude Desktop? The same page gives you an mcp.json block with the identical url and Authorization header — drop it into your MCP config.

A note on tokens

Your token is your account, so treat it like a password: it is shown a single time, kept only as a hash on our side, and revocable the moment you no longer need it. Copy the command from your own dashboard rather than from here — it fills in both your host and a fresh token for you.

That is the whole setup. Point Claude at Apollo, describe the lecture you want, and let it do the clicking.