Mattermost Agents v2: OpenAI compatible AI Service Fails with "No Valid Keys" Error Due to Missing API Key

Applies to: Mattermost Agents plugin (mattermost-ai) v2.x; Mattermost Server v11.x and later

Symptoms: AI bot responses fail and the Agents plugin logs errors repeatedly when a local or self-hosted OpenAI-compatible service is configured without an API key.

🛑 Problem

The Agents plugin requires a non-empty API Key field for every configured AI service, including local and self-hosted OpenAI-compatible services (such as Ollama, LM Studio, LocalAI, or vLLM) that do not require API key authentication. Leaving the field blank causes all model-fetch and inference requests to fail.

Symptoms

Users or administrators experiencing this issue will see:

failed to fetch models: bifrost - no valid keys found for provider: openai

Additional symptoms:

• The model dropdown in System Console > Plugins > Agents does not populate after entering the service URL.
• AI bot users receive no response in channels.
• The error repeats dozens of times per session in mattermost.log.

✅ Solution

Enter any non-empty placeholder value in the API Key field of the affected AI service. The plugin only checks that the field is populated; it does not validate the key or forward it to the provider. No restart of Mattermost Server or the Agents plugin is required.

Enter a Placeholder API Key

1. Navigate to System Console > Plugins > Agents.
2. Under AI Services, select the affected service entry (configured as OpenAI Compatible), or click Add an AI Service if none exists.
3. In the API Key field, enter any non-empty string:

placeholder

4. Click Save.
5. Reopen the model dropdown - the list should now load from your provider endpoint.

⚠️ Important: The placeholder value is never forwarded to the provider. It satisfies the plugin's internal field-presence check only. No server or plugin restart is required after saving.

Additional Resources

For more information, see:

Configure AI Services - Mattermost documentation