Readability (Fetch & Parse)

🚀 Mozilla Readability Parser MCP Server (Python / FastMCP)

This project is a Python implementation that extracts and transforms web page content into an optimized Markdown format, following the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It's designed for processing by large language models (LLMs).

📚 Table of Contents

• ✨ Features
• ❓ Why Not Just Scrape?
• 📦 Installation
• 🚀 Quick Start
• 📄 Tool Reference
• 📋 Dependencies
• 📄 License

✨ Features

• Remove ads, navigation bars, footers, and other non-essential content.
• Convert clean HTML into well-formatted Markdown.
• Handle errors gracefully.
• Optimize the processing flow for LLMs.
• Lightweight and fast.

❓ Why Not Just Scrape?

Unlike simple scraping requests, this server:

• Uses the Readability algorithm to extract relevant content.
• Eliminates noise such as ads, pop-ups, and navigation menus.
• Reduces token usage by removing unnecessary HTML/CSS.
• Provides a consistent Markdown format for better LLM processing.
• Handles complex web pages with dynamic content.

📦 Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/jmh108/MCP-server-readability-python.git
cd MCP-server-readability-python

2. Create and activate a virtual environment:

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows, use: venv\Scripts\activate

3. Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

🚀 Quick Start

1. Start the server:

fastmcp run server.py

2. Example request:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/tools/extract_content \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com/article"}'

📄 Tool Reference

extract_content

Scrape and convert web page content into clean Markdown.

Parameters:

{
  "url": {
    "type": "string",
    "description": "The URL of the website to parse",
    "required": true
  }
}

Return value:

{
  "content": "Markdown content..."
}

MCP Server Configuration

To configure the server in the MCP settings file, add the following:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "readability": {
      "command": "fastmcp",
      "args": ["run", "server.py"],
      "env": {}
    }
  }
}

Then start the server using the MCP protocol and access it via the parse tool.

📋 Dependencies

• readability-lxml: For content extraction.
• Flask: For building web services.
• fastapi: For API interfaces.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. For more details, see the LICENSE file.

🌟 Contribution and Reference

This project is an adaptation based on the original server-moz-readability implementation, developed by emzimmer. (See the original README.md for the original README document.)

This Python implementation systematically translates the original concept into an MCP operation based on FastMCP.