Best for
- AI coding agents that need technical documentation lookup
- Teams seeking to reduce irrelevant documentation context and token usage
- Users who need access to public and authorized private documentation resources
R
Ref MCP
Community
Token-efficient documentation search for coding agents.
GitHub source repository ↗
55FMRS · C
The supplied materials describe Ref MCP as a token-efficient documentation search and URL-reading server for coding agents, supporting Streamable HTTP and legacy stdio with API-key authentication.
Ref MCP is a Model Context Protocol server that gives AI coding tools and agents access to public and private documentation for APIs, services, and libraries. It filters repeated search results and returns the most relevant parts of pages using session search history to reduce context usage.
Tools
ref_search_documentation
Searches technical documentation for facts or code snippets across public web and GitHub content, as well as private repositories and PDFs.
ref_read_url
Fetches a URL and converts its content to Markdown, useful for reading documentation pages returned by search.
Setup
Streamable HTTP is recommended: connect to https://api.ref.tools/mcp and provide an API key. The legacy stdio option runs npx ref-tools-mcp@latest with the API key supplied through REF_API_KEY.
claude_desktop_config.json
{"Ref":{"command":"npx","args":["ref-tools-mcp@latest"],"env":{"REF_API_KEY":"YOUR_API_KEY"}}}
Fit and risk
Not for
- MCP workflows that do not need documentation retrieval
- Users without a Ref API key
- General-purpose web scraping scenarios rather than documentation search and reading
Required permissions
- An API key is required for authentication
- Private-resource use requires authorization to those private repositories or documents
Risks and side effects
- The API key is a secret credential and should not be exposed or committed to shared configuration
- Searching private repositories and PDFs may expose their contents to the agent
- Retrieved content becomes part of the agent context and should still be checked against the task
Troubleshooting
- Verify that the API key is valid and supplied through X-Ref-Api-Key, the URL configuration, or REF_API_KEY
- For Streamable HTTP, check the https://api.ref.tools/mcp endpoint and authentication settings
- For stdio, confirm that npx is available and ref-tools-mcp@latest can be run
- If retrieved content is unexpected, search first with ref_search_documentation and then call ref_read_url on a relevant URL
Use cases
Find API, service, and library documentation for coding agents
Search for relevant documentation and then read selected pages
Retrieve facts and code snippets from public or private resources
Supported clients
CursorFull support