defuddle-fetch-mcp-server

A Model Context Protocol server that provides web content fetching capabilities using the Defuddle library. This server enables LLMs to retrieve and process content from web pages, automatically cleaning up the HTML and converting it to clean, readable markdown.

This is a drop-in replacement for the default fetch MCP server that uses Readability. This generally provides better results for most modern webpages.

Comparison

(using this issue)

Features

• Better Content Extraction: Uses Defuddle to remove webpage clutter and extract main content: while keeping things like the page title and key metadata
• Flexible Output: Supports both markdown and raw HTML output
• Chunked Reading: Supports pagination with start_index and max_length parameters
• Rich Metadata: Extracts title, author, publication date, word count, and more

Installation

Follow the instructions on install-mcp, which generates the right config for your MCP client (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, VS Code, and more).

Components

Tools

• fetch
  • Fetches a URL from the internet and extracts its contents as clean, markdown text using Defuddle
  • Input parameters:
    • url (string, required): URL to fetch
    • max_length (number, optional): Maximum number of characters to return. Defaults to 5000.
    • start_index (number, optional): Start content from this character index. Defaults to 0.
    • raw (boolean, optional): Get raw content without markdown conversion. Defaults to false.
  • Returns cleaned content with metadata including title, author, publication date, word count, domain, and processing time

Contributing

Pull requests are welcomed on GitHub! To get started:

1. Install Git and Node.js
2. Clone the repository
3. Install dependencies with npm install
4. Run npm run test to run tests
5. Build with npm run build

To add it to Claude Desktop, run npm run build then add the following configuration to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "defuddle-fetch": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": [
        "/path/to/clone/defuddle-fetch-mcp-server/dist/index.js"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Releases

Versions follow the semantic versioning spec.

To release:

1. Use npm version <major | minor | patch> to bump the version
2. Run git push --follow-tags to push with tags
3. Wait for GitHub Actions to publish to the NPM registry.