Up-to-date documentation for your coding agent. Covers 1000s of public repos and sites. Built by ref.tools
Ref mcp server lets Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients work with Ref directly. Up-to-date documentation for your coding agent. Covers 1000s of public repos and sites. Built by ref.tools.
A ModelContextProtocol server that gives your AI coding tool or agent access to documentation for APIs, services, libraries etc. It's your one-stop-shop to keep your agent up-to-date on documentation in a fast and token-efficient way.
Once connected, the assistant can call these 3 tools directly:
stdio — The stdio tool exposed by this serverref_search_documentation — A powerful search tool to check technical documentation. Great for finding facts or code snippets. Can be used to search for public documentation on the web orref_read_url — A tool that fetches content from a URL and converts it to markdown for easy reading with Ref. This is powerful when used in conjunction with theThe server is distributed via npm as npm, so most clients can run it without a manual build step. Add it to your MCP client's configuration and restart the client to pick it up — the copy-paste configs for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor are on this page.
Before the server will start you need to supply 2 environment variables: YOUR_API_KEY, REF_API_KEY. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than committing them.
Knowledge and memory servers address the most frustrating trait of language models — walking into every conversation with no recollection of the last one. Ref sits in that group, and the shape of its toolset — stdio, ref_search_documentation, ref_read_url — tells you what it is really for. Worth comparing against the other knowledge memory servers in this directory before you commit to one, since several overlap in scope but differ sharply in setup cost and permissions.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| stdio | The stdio tool exposed by this server. |
| ref_search_documentation | A powerful search tool to check technical documentation. Great for finding facts or code snippets. Can be used to search for public documentation on the web or github as well from private resources like repos and pdfs. |
| ref_read_url | A tool that fetches content from a URL and converts it to markdown for easy reading with Ref. This is powerful when used in conjunction with the ref_search_documentation tool that returns urls of relevant content. |
{
"mcpServers": {
"ref-tools": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "npm"],
"env": {
"YOUR_API_KEY": "your-value",
"REF_API_KEY": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| YOUR_API_KEY | Credential the server authenticates with. | Yes |
| REF_API_KEY | Credential the server authenticates with. | Yes |
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