mcpdoc // a documentation format for MCP servers

A standard way to document an MCP server

An MCPDoc describes one MCP server: what it does, how to connect to it, which tools it offers and on what terms. Every fact in it is marked with where that fact came from, so a reader can tell the publisher's own description from something somebody confirmed by connecting to the server.

Three marks

Every field carries exactly one of these. They are the only thing MCPDoc adds to documentation a publisher has already written.

said The publisher's own statement, taken from their documentation or their repository. Nobody has checked it.
seen Read from the running server, by opening a session and asking it. Carries the date it was read and who read it.
not published The publisher did not state this. Printed rather than left blank, because a missing licence is worth knowing about.

A publisher's documentation is right on the day it is written, and most of an MCPDoc is that documentation, marked said. The marks let a reader see which parts have been confirmed since, and when.

Why the marks earn their place

Browserbase's README lists all six of its tools and says the table matches their hosted server. In it, navigate takes { url: string }, and start and end take nothing at all.

Ask the hosted server, and all six tools take a sessionId that the README does not mention once.

Nobody was careless. That repository is archived, so its README stopped while the server kept going. This is ordinary, and it is why a tool list is worth marking with a date rather than printing as a plain fact. That server's MCPDoc is the worked example on this site.

Generating one

An MCPDoc can be written by hand, but for a hosted server most of it can be read directly. The generator opens a session, asks for the tool list, and optionally reads the server's public repository metadata.

# a hosted server, and its repository
npx mcpdoc https://mcp.example.com/mcp --repo owner/name --by "Your Name"

It writes mcpdoc.json, which is the document, and mcpdoc.html, which renders it. It never calls a tool, never installs anything, and never writes outside the directory you run it in. Full instructions.

What MCPDoc is not

It is not a review, a rating or a score, and there is no badge. A badge collapses provenance into one word, and provenance is the part a reader needs.

It does not replace a publisher's own documentation. Setup, credentials and worked examples are theirs to write and nobody else can. MCPDoc gives that documentation a shape other tools can read, and records which parts anybody has stood behind.

Related

AgentDoc does the same job for an agent rather than an MCP server: one document about one agent, assembled from several sources, with every line saying where it came from. Both are chapters of the same family of standards developed alongside AgentMesh.