Ref
About
Up-to-date documentation for your coding agent. Covers 1000s of public repos and sites. Built by [ref.tools](https://ref.tools/)
Details
- Transport
- SSE
- License
- MIT
Explore
- Deduplicates search results within a session.
- Returns only the most relevant 5k tokens per page.
- Reduces context rot by minimizing irrelevant tokens.
- Supports both streamable HTTP and stdio transports.
- Works as a documentation source for OpenAI deep research.
- Tracks search trajectory across MCP sessions.
Setting up with Highlight
This MCP is not yet compatible with Highlight’s one-click setup. However, you can still use it with Highlight by following these steps:
- Download and install Highlight from highlightai.com/download
- Navigate to the plugins tab and select "Add Custom Plugin"
-
Configure the plugin with the settings below
Plugin Name
RefCommand (node, npx, python, etc.)Please refer to the README for specific instructions on how to obtain API keys or other required environment variables.
- Enable "Start Automatically" if you want the plugin to start when Highlight launches
From the repository
There are two options for setting up Ref as an MCP server, either via the streamable-http server (recommended) or local stdio server (legacy).
This repo contains the legacy stdio server.
For development and debugging purposes, you can use the MCP Inspector tool. The Inspector provides a visual interface for testing and monitoring MCP server interactions.
Visit the Inspector documentation for detailed setup instructions.
To test locally with Inspector:
npm run inspect
Or run both the watcher and inspector:
npm run dev
ref_search_documentation
Search for documentation on the web or github as well from private resources like repos and pdfs. Use Ref 'ref_read_url' to read the content of a url.
ref_read_url
Read the content of a url as markdown. The EXACT url from a 'ref_search_documentation' result should be passed to this tool.
Ref MCP server provides all the documentation related tools for your agent needs.
Claude Desktop / Cursor
Paste into your MCP client config file to install this server.
{
"mcpServers": {
"ref": {
"Ref": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"ref-tools-mcp@latest"
],
"env": {
"REF_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY"
}
}
}
}
}McpServers
{
"Ref": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"ref-tools-mcp@latest"
],
"env": {
"REF_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY"
}
}
}Tools
Ref MCP server provides all the documentation related tools for your agent needs.
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.
Parameters:
- query (required): Query to search for relevant documentation. This should be a full sentence or question.
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.
Parameters:
- url (required): The URL of the webpage to read.
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