Fetch MCP server

Fetch MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol server that provides web content fetching capabilities. This server enables LLMs to retrieve and process content from web pages, converting HTML to markdown for easier consumption.

Source: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/src/fetch

Requires MCP Python SDK 2.x (mcp>=2.3,<3).

[!CAUTION] This server can access local/internal IP addresses and may represent a security risk. Exercise caution when using this MCP server to ensure this does not expose any sensitive data. By default the server refuses to fetch private, loopback, link-local and other non-public addresses, including cloud metadata endpoints such as 169.254.169.254, and checks every redirect hop the same way. The --allow-private-ips argument turns this guard off; see Customization - Private addresses. The guard checks the addresses a hostname resolves to before each request, so it does not protect against DNS rebinding between that check and the connection, and a hostname the server cannot resolve itself (one only a proxy can resolve) is not checked.

The fetch tool will truncate the response, but by using the start_index argument, you can specify where to start the content extraction. This lets models read a webpage in chunks, until they find the information they need.

Available Tools

• fetch - Fetches a URL from the internet and extracts its contents as markdown.
• url (string, required): URL to fetch
• max_length (integer, optional): Maximum number of characters to return (default: 5000)
• start_index (integer, optional): Start content from this character index (default: 0)
• raw (boolean, optional): Get raw content without markdown conversion (default: false)
• Annotations: readOnlyHint: true, destructiveHint: false, idempotentHint: true, openWorldHint: true (it only reads, and it reaches arbitrary hosts on the internet)

Prompts

• fetch
• Fetch a URL and extract its contents as markdown
• Arguments:
• url (string, required): URL to fetch

Errors

• A failed fetch (a robots.txt refusal, an unreachable page, an HTTP error status, a refused private address, an unusable proxy setting) and arguments that do not match the tool's schema are returned as a tool result with isError: true, whose text starts Error executing tool fetch: and says what went wrong, so the model can read it and decide what to do.
• Calling a tool the server does not have is a JSON-RPC protocol error, -32602 (Unknown tool: <name>), as the specification requires. So is getting a prompt it does not have (Unknown prompt: <name>), or the fetch prompt without its url (URL is required).
• When the fetch prompt's fetch fails, the prompt still returns: its message holds the reason the fetch failed.

The server is built on the MCP Python SDK's high-level MCPServer: the tool and the prompt are decorated functions, and their type hints and field descriptions are the input schema and the prompt's arguments.

Protocol versions