mcp-server-web-fetcher

A fast, dependency-light Model Context Protocol server that turns any web page into something a language model can actually read: clean Markdown, structured metadata, and a classified list of links.

Web pages are 90% chrome. Scripts, cookie banners, navigation, sidebars and tracking pixels burn context and derail reasoning. This server strips all of that on the way in, so the model sees the article and nothing else.

┌────────────┐   stdio/JSON-RPC   ┌──────────────────────┐   HTTPS   ┌──────────┐
│ MCP client │ ─────────────────► │ mcp-server-web-      │ ────────► │ web page │
│ (Claude,   │ ◄───────────────── │ fetcher              │ ◄──────── │          │
│  Kiro, …)  │  Markdown + JSON   │ fetch → clean → md   │           └──────────┘
└────────────┘                    └──────────────────────┘

Features

• Clean Markdown output. Readability-style main-content detection, GFM tables, language-tagged code fences, absolute links. No leftover HTML, even for gnarly nested tables.
• Context-window aware. Long pages are paginated with startIndex / nextStartIndex instead of being silently cut in half.
• Structured metadata. Title, description, canonical, lang, author, publish/modify dates, Open Graph, Twitter cards, JSON-LD, hreflang alternates, RSS/Atom feeds, h1–h6 outline and raw HTTP headers.
• Link intelligence. Absolute URLs, anchor text, rel, nofollow, internal vs external classification, scope filters, de-duplication.
• SSRF hardening. Loopback, private, link-local and cloud-metadata addresses are blocked on every redirect hop, not just the first request. Credentials in URLs are stripped.
• Predictable failures. Every error carries a stable machine-readable code (TIMEOUT, HTTP_ERROR, BLOCKED_HOST, RESPONSE_TOO_LARGE, …), a retryability flag and a recovery hint, so the model can self-correct instead of guessing.
• Typed end to end. Strict Zod input schemas plus published outputSchema, so clients get validated structuredContent, not prose they have to re-parse.
• Well behaved. Byte caps, timeouts, redirect limits, charset sniffing (including legacy encodings), a small TTL cache, transient-failure retries and optional robots.txt enforcement.
• 115 tests, no network required. Vitest unit tests plus in-memory MCP protocol tests.

Quickstart

Requires Node.js 20.18.1 or newer (inherited from cheerio, which needs undici 7).

# run it without installing
npx -y mcp-server-web-fetcher

# or install globally
npm install -g mcp-server-web-fetcher
mcp-server-web-fetcher

The server speaks MCP over stdio, so on its own it just waits for a client. Point a client at it:

Claude Desktop

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS, %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json on Windows:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "web-fetcher": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-server-web-fetcher"]
    }
  }
}

With configuration, using a global install:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "web-fetcher": {
      "command": "mcp-server-web-fetcher",
      "env": {
        "WEB_FETCHER_TIMEOUT_MS": "20000",
        "WEB_FETCHER_RESPECT_ROBOTS": "true"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop, then ask it to summarise a URL.

Claude Code

claude mcp add web-fetcher -- npx -y mcp-server-web-fetcher

Kiro, Cursor, Windsurf and other MCP clients

Same shape, in .kiro/settings/mcp.json / the client's MCP config file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "web-fetcher": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-server-web-fetcher"],
      "disabled": false,
      "autoApprove": ["fetch_page_markdown", "extract_metadata", "extract_links"]
    }
  }
}

MCP Registry

The server is listed in the official MCP Registry as io.github.vojtisprime11/web-fetcher, so clients that read the registry can discover it directly:

curl "https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io/v0.1/servers?search=io.github.vojtisprime11/web-fetcher"

Docker

docker build -t mcp-server-web-fetcher .

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "web-fetcher": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "--rm", "-i", "mcp-server-web-fetcher"]
    }
  }
}

The image runs as the unprivileged node user and carries production dependencies only. CI builds it and drives it with a real MCP client, so it is verified to start and answer introspection.

From source

git clone https://github.com/vojtisprime11/mcp-server-web-fetcher.git
cd mcp-server-web-fetcher
npm install
npm run build
node dist/index.js          # or: npm run inspect

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "web-fetcher": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/mcp-server-web-fetcher/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

All three tools are read-only, idempotent and open-world (annotated as such in the protocol), and all take an absolute http(s) URL.

fetch_page_markdown

Downloads a page and returns clean, LLM-friendly Markdown.

Request:

{
  "name": "fetch_page_markdown",
  "arguments": {
    "url": "https://example.com/blog/caching",
    "maxLength": 8000,
    "mainContentOnly": true,
    "includeImages": false
  }
}

structuredContent:

{
  "url": "https://example.com/blog/caching",
  "requestedUrl": "https://example.com/blog/caching",
  "status": 200,
  "contentType": "text/html; charset=utf-8",
  "title": "How caching works",
  "markdown": "# How caching works\n\nCaching is the art of **not** doing work twice...",
  "markdownLength": 7984,
  "totalLength": 21874,
  "startIndex": 0,
  "endIndex": 7984,
  "nextStartIndex": 7984,
  "truncated": true,
  "wordCount": 1203,
  "bytesDownloaded": 148213,
  "elapsedMs": 412,
  "fromCache": false,
  "redirects": [],
  "metadata": {
    "title": "How caching works",
    "description": "A deep dive into HTTP caching.",
    "canonical": "https://example.com/blog/caching",
    "language": "en",
    "author": "Ada Lovelace",
    "publishedTime": "2026-01-15T09:00:00Z"
  }
}

To read the rest, call again with "startIndex": 7984. Keep going while nextStartIndex is not null.

extract_metadata

Everything a model needs to classify a page, without spending context on its body.

{
  "name": "extract_metadata",
  "arguments": { "url": "https://example.com/blog/caching", "includeJsonLd": true }
}

structuredContent (abridged):