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About Ref MCP

Ref hosted Streamable HTTP MCP lets coding agents search and read public or private technical documentation.

What you can use it for

  • Developer documentation search
Connection and setup
Hosting
hosted
Transport
Streamable HTTP
Endpoint
https://api.ref.tools/mcp
Authentication
OAuth, x-ref-api-key header, or apiKey query parameter.

Requirements

  • MCP-compatible client
  • Ref account for API key or OAuth access
  • Local legacy option requires Node.js/npm and a Ref API key

Setup steps

  1. Recommended: add https://api.ref.tools/mcp as a remote Streamable HTTP MCP server; omit API-key parameters to start OAuth, or configure an API key using the client's secure header mechanism.
  2. Create/manage API keys at https://ref.tools/keys. The docs also document ?apiKey= as a URL option; prefer client-managed secrets where available.
  3. Legacy local option: run npx ref-tools-mcp@latest and set REF_API_KEY in the client environment configuration.
  4. If the account has multiple teams and OAuth selects the wrong scope, use the team-specific URL documented by Ref.
  5. Reload the client and verify with a read-only ref_search_documentation query.
Tools 2

The official Ref MCP repository README enumerates these two tools and their required arguments.

  • ref_search_documentation

    Search technical documentation, public web content, GitHub repositories, private repositories, and PDFs for relevant facts or code snippets.

    Parameters: query (required): full sentence or question
    01
  • ref_read_url

    Fetch a webpage URL and convert its content to Markdown for reading.

    Parameters: url (required): webpage URL
    02
Limitations and notes
  • API-key or OAuth authentication is required before inventory can be observed.
Original sources

Documentation checked 2026-10-29T00:00:00Z. Connection has not been runtime tested.

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