Fetch

What it does

Downloads a URL and converts HTML into Markdown so the model reads text instead of markup. Handles chunking and start-index paging for long documents. It respects robots.txt by default, which is the right default but does mean some sites simply will not load.

Install

uvx mcp-server-fetch

Client configuration

Paste this into your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any client that reads mcpServers), then restart the client.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fetch": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-server-fetch"
      ]
    }
  }
}

When to use it

Reach for this when the task needs web inside the agent loop. Skip it if a plain shell command or a one-off script is enough — every server you add costs context and adds a failure mode.

Other Python servers

• Git — Read-only access to a repository's history: status, diffs, commit logs, and blame
• Time — Timezone conversion and current-time lookup using the IANA database
• SQLite — Query and inspect a local SQLite file, including schema discovery and arbitrary SELECT statements