Website to Markdown Converter MCP server

The Website Scraper is a versatile tool that extracts meaningful content from web pages and converts it to clean, readable Markdown format. It operates both as a command-line utility and as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, making it flexible for different usage scenarios.

Installation

To install the Website Scraper, follow these steps:

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Build the project
npm run build

# Optionally, install globally
npm install -g .

Usage Options

Command Line Interface

You can use the tool directly from the command line with several options:

# Print output to console
scrape https://example.com

# Save output to a file
scrape https://example.com output.md

# Convert a local HTML file to Markdown
scrape --html-file input.html

# Convert a local HTML file and save output to a file
scrape --html-file input.html output.md

# Show help
scrape --help

You can also run it through npm:

npm run start:cli -- https://example.com

MCP Server Mode

To run the tool as a Model Context Protocol server:

# Start in MCP server mode
npm start

Programmatic Usage

The tool can also be used programmatically in your JavaScript or TypeScript projects:

Web Scraping Example

import { scrapeToMarkdown } from './build/index.js';

async function example() {
  // Scrape a website and convert to Markdown
  const markdown = await scrapeToMarkdown('https://example.com');
  console.log(markdown);
}

Direct HTML Conversion

import { htmlToMarkdown } from './build/data_processing.js';

function example() {
  // Convert HTML string directly to Markdown
  const html = '<h1>Hello World</h1><p>This is <strong>bold</strong> text.</p>';
  const md = htmlToMarkdown(html);
  console.log(md);
}

How to add this MCP server to Cursor

There are two ways to add an MCP server to Cursor. The most common way is to add the server globally in the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file so that it is available in all of your projects.

If you only need the server in a single project, you can add it to the project instead by creating or adding it to the .cursor/mcp.json file.

Adding an MCP server to Cursor globally

To add a global MCP server go to Cursor Settings > MCP and click "Add new global MCP server".

When you click that button the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file will be opened and you can add your server like this:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "cursor-rules-mcp": {
            "command": "npx",
            "args": [
                "-y",
                "cursor-rules-mcp"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Adding an MCP server to a project

To add an MCP server to a project you can create a new .cursor/mcp.json file or add it to the existing one. This will look exactly the same as the global MCP server example above.

How to use the MCP server

Once the server is installed, you might need to head back to Settings > MCP and click the refresh button.

The Cursor agent will then be able to see the available tools the added MCP server has available and will call them when it needs to.

You can also explictly ask the agent to use the tool by mentioning the tool name and describing what the function does.