Red Hat Developer Blog Search - MCP Server

MCP server that searches and reads content from the Red Hat Developer site (developers.redhat.com). Built on the Hydra/Solr search API that powers the site's search page.

Tools

Tool	Description
search_rhdp	Search blogs, articles, learning paths, etc. Filter by content type, product, topic. Sort by relevance or date.
fetch_rhdp_page	Fetch full article text from a developers.redhat.com URL. Returns clean markdown extracted from the page.

Build the container

podman build -t rhdp-blog-search:latest -f Containerfile .

Configure Claude Code

Add the server to a project-level settings file so it only loads when you are working in a project that needs it. This avoids adding tool descriptions to every session's system prompt (which costs input tokens).

Create or edit .claude/settings.json in the project where you want access:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rhdp-blog-search": {
      "command": "podman",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "rhdp-blog-search:latest"]
    }
  }
}

To use it globally (loads every session — more token overhead), add the same block to ~/.claude/settings.json instead.

Keeping token cost low

The MCP server only runs while a Claude Code session is active — Podman starts the container when the session begins and stops it when the session ends. There is no background daemon.

However, the two tool descriptions are included in every prompt of a session where the server is configured. To minimize unnecessary cost:

• Use project-level config (.claude/settings.json in the project root) rather than global config. The tools only appear in sessions started from that directory.
• Don't add it to your home directory config unless you want it everywhere.
• Alternatively, start Claude Code with an explicit MCP config file:

  claude --mcp-config path/to/mcp.json
  

Usage in Claude Code

Once configured, ask Claude to use the tools naturally:

Search Red Hat Developer blogs about OpenShift Virtualization best practices and summarize what you find. Cite each blog with its URL.

Find the newest blog posts about OpenShift GitOps and give me a summary of each one with links.

Research how to set up OpenShift AI on Developer Sandbox. Use the Red Hat Developer blog search to find relevant articles, then read the most relevant ones and give me a step-by-step guide with citations.

Claude will call search_rhdp to find relevant content, then fetch_rhdp_page to read specific articles, and cite them with URLs from the results.

search_rhdp parameters

Parameter	Default	Description
query	(required)	Search terms
content_type	blog_post	Comma-separated: article, blog_post, books, cheat_sheet, events, learning_path, video_resource
product		Filter by product, e.g. Red Hat OpenShift
topic		Filter by topic, e.g. Kubernetes
sort	relevant	relevant, newest, oldest
max_results	10	Number of results (max 50)

CLI usage (without MCP)

The search module also works standalone:

python3 rhdp_blog_search.py openshift --type blog_post --sort newest --rows 5
python3 rhdp_blog_search.py openshift --facets-only
python3 rhdp_blog_search.py openshift --type blog_post --json

How it works

The Red Hat Developer search page is a React SPA that queries a Solr-backed API at access.redhat.com/hydra/rest/search/platform/developers. This server calls that API directly, bypassing the JavaScript frontend, and returns structured JSON results. The fetch_rhdp_page tool fetches individual blog pages and extracts article text using BeautifulSoup.