[BUG]: MAX_MEMBERS_PER_TEAM cannot be overriden.

[ja8zyjits]

🐞 Bug Summary

MAX_MEMBERS_PER_TEAM once set in the env creates a hard limit for the team membership.
To change this the administrator needs to change the env value and then restart. Even then for existing teams this wont reset the value in the DB.

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🧩 Affected Component

Select the area of the project impacted:

• mcpgateway - API
• mcpgateway - UI (admin panel)
• mcpgateway.wrapper - stdio wrapper
• Federation or Transports
• CLI, Makefiles, or shell scripts
• Container setup (Docker/Podman/Compose)
• Other (explain below)

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🔁 Steps to Reproduce

1. Set MAX_MEMBERS_PER_TEAM as 2
2. Create a team
3. Add 2 members
4. Stop the gateway, update the env MAX_MEMBERS_PER_TEAM to 3 and start the gateway
5. Add a new member

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🤔 Expected Behavior

We need to rethink this issue, should we override the env values programmatically or should we remove this hard limit?

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🧠 Environment Info

You can retrieve most of this from the /version endpoint.

Key	Value
Version or commit	RC-2
Runtime	e.g. Python 3.11, Gunicorn
Platform / OS	e.g. Ubuntu 22.04, macOS
Container	e.g. Docker, Podman, none

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Additional Context:

There is an API to override this value

curl -X 'PUT' \
  'http://localhost:8080/teams/<team_id>' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "name": "string",
  "description": "string",
  "visibility": "private",
  "max_members": 200
}'

But this is not documented anywhere.

[crivetimihai]

Thanks @ja8zyjits. The MAX_MEMBERS_PER_TEAM setting should be overridable via environment variable since it's a Pydantic Field(). If it's not being picked up, possible causes: (1) env var name case mismatch, (2) setting read at import time vs from settings instance, (3) default override in code. Could you confirm the exact env var name you're setting and verify via kubectl exec <pod> -- env | grep MAX_MEMBERS? Related to #3589.

[gcgoncalves]

UI related issue: #3513
Code for the above: #3623