rss-digest-mcp

A stateless RSS competitive-intelligence MCP server. Point it at a list of public RSS/Atom feeds — competitor blogs, industry news, release notes, job boards — and get back a keyword-filtered, de-duplicated, recency-sorted digest. No database, no API keys, no login.

"What did my three competitors and the two industry news sites publish in the last 24 hours that mention pricing or layoffs?" — one tool call.

What it does

rss-digest-mcp turns a pile of feed URLs into a single, focused digest. It fetches and parses each feed, keeps only items that (a) are recent enough and (b) match your keywords, removes duplicates across feeds, sorts newest-first, and returns clean structured items your LLM can summarise or act on.

It is stateless and privacy-respecting: nothing is stored. Feeds are fetched on demand, filtered, returned, and forgotten. No personal data is collected.

Why MCP

Reading feeds is easy; deciding what matters is the work. By exposing this as an MCP server, the filtering/dedup/recency logic runs deterministically in the tool, and the LLM (Claude, Cursor, Cline…) does what it is good at on top: summarising the digest, spotting themes, drafting an alert. The model never has to fetch or page through raw XML, and the same server works identically across every MCP client — so a "morning competitive brief" is one natural-language request away.

Quick Start

This is a tool server, not a CLI reader. It does not print feeds on its own. It exposes tools that an MCP client (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline) calls for you. You get RSS digests by connecting it to a client and asking in plain language — not by running a command here.

So the only required step is Configuration (connect it to your client). The steps below are an optional sanity check.

Requires Python ≥ 3.10; the client launches the server via uv.

# (optional) clone + run the tests — stdlib only, no install, proves it works
git clone https://github.com/tefunamu/rss-digest-mcp.git
cd rss-digest-mcp
python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -v        # 16 tests, expect "OK"

You do not need to start the server by hand — your MCP client does that. If you just want to confirm it boots, uvx --from . rss-digest-mcp will sit silently waiting for a client to speak MCP over stdio (that silence is correct — there is no output until a client calls a tool). Press Ctrl-C to stop.

Once connected (next section), ask your client something like:

"Use get_digest on https://hnrss.org/frontpage and https://zenn.dev/feed, keywords AI, last 24 hours."

Configuration

The server speaks MCP over stdio. Add one of the blocks below to your client, then ask: "Use get_digest on these feeds for the last 24h with keywords pricing, funding."

Use the absolute path to this repo in every example below. A wrong/relative path is the #1 reason the server silently fails to start.

Windows ARM64 users: install the package with the constraints file first — see Troubleshooting › Windows ARM64.

Claude Code

# from anywhere — register the server (use the absolute repo path)
claude mcp add rss-digest -- uvx --from /ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/rss-digest-mcp rss-digest-mcp
# add -s user to make it available in every project:
#   claude mcp add -s user rss-digest -- uvx --from /ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/rss-digest-mcp rss-digest-mcp

claude mcp list            # should show  rss-digest: ✓ connected

Then in a new session: "Use get_digest on https://zenn.dev/feed, keywords AI, last 24h."

Claude Desktop

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) / %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rss-digest": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/rss-digest-mcp", "rss-digest-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor

~/.cursor/mcp.json (or Settings → MCP → Add):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rss-digest": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/rss-digest-mcp", "rss-digest-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cline (VS Code)

cline_mcp_settings.json (Cline → MCP Servers → Configure):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rss-digest": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/rss-digest-mcp", "rss-digest-mcp"],
      "disabled": false
    }
  }
}

Tools provided

What these tools are not: get_digest is a deterministic filter over the feeds you give it — it matches keywords as plain substrings and sorts by recency. It does not search the web, and it does not infer which feeds a topic belongs to. Choosing the right feed URLs, turning a question into keywords, and judging whether a hit is actually relevant is the client's (the LLM's) job — the tool just fetches, filters and dedups. So "find what Japanese electronics makers said about pricing" only works if the client first supplies those makers' feed URLs and sensible keywords.

Tool	Arguments	Returns
get_digest	feeds: string[], keywords?: string[], hours: int = 24, max_items: int = 30, summary_max_chars: int = 0	Combined digest across all feeds: matched items (newest first, deduped by link), count, feeds_ok, per-feed errors. Empty keywords = pure recency digest; hours = 0 disables the time filter; summary_max_chars > 0 shortens each summary (default 0 = full).
fetch_feed	url: string, limit: int = 20, summary_max_chars: int = 0	Latest items of one feed (newest first), plus feed_title and any parse error. summary_max_chars > 0 shortens summaries.
load_opml	path: string	Feed list (title + xmlUrl) parsed from a local OPML export, for bulk onboarding. Reads only the file you point at.

Each returned item has: title, link, summary (HTML-stripped), source (feed title), published (ISO-8601 UTC), published_ts (epoch).

Example feeds (incl. Japanese sources)

Works with any RSS/Atom feed. feedparser decodes legacy Japanese encodings (Shift_JIS / EUC-JP) transparently, so Japanese sources work out of the box:

• Hacker News front page — https://hnrss.org/frontpage
• NHK 主要ニュース — https://www.nhk.or.jp/rss/news/cat0.xml
• Zenn (trending) — https://zenn.dev/feed
• Qiita (popular) — https://qiita.com/popular-items/feed
• GitHub repo releases — https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/releases.atom

Usage examples

Once connected, you drive it in plain language — your MCP client turns the request into the right tool call. Examples (paste into Claude / Cursor / Cline):

Competitive / industry monitoring

Use get_digest on https://hnrss.org/frontpage and https://techcrunch.com/feed/, keywords pricing, layoffs, funding, last 24 hours, then summarize the themes.

Japanese tech news, compact summaries

get_digest on https://zenn.dev/feed and https://qiita.com/popular-items/feed, keyword AI, last 24h, summary_max_chars 200.

Just the latest from one source

fetch_feed https://news.ycombinator.com/rss, limit 10.

Onboard a feed list, then digest it

load_opml ./feeds.opml, then get_digest on those URLs with keyword AI.

A real run — 2 feeds, keyword AI, last 24h, summary_max_chars=200 — returns:

{
  "count": 5,
  "feeds_requested": 2,
  "feeds_ok": 2,
  "errors": [],
  "items": [
    {
      "title": "OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom",
      "link": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/24/openai-unveils-its-first-custom-chip-built-by-broadcom/",
      "summary": "Announcement: …",
      "source": "Hacker News: Front Page",
      "published": "2026-06-24T17:47:00Z",
      "published_ts": 1782323220.0
    }
    // … 4 more, newest first, deduped across both feeds
  ]
}

The client (the LLM) chooses the feeds + keywords and reads this back to you as a brief; the tool just fetches, filters and dedups.

Architecture

MCP client (Claude Desktop / Cursor / Cline)
        │  stdio (MCP)
        ▼
server.py  ── FastMCP tools: get_digest / fetch_feed / load_opml
        │        │
        │        └─ feedparser  →  fetch + parse RSS/Atom/JSON (handles JP encodings)
        ▼
core.py    ── pure, stdlib-only logic: recency filter · keyword match ·
              dedup-by-link · newest-first sort · cap

The split is deliberate: core.py has zero third-party imports, so the business logic is fully unit-tested without the network or the MCP SDK (server.py is the thin I/O shell). Stateless by design — no storage layer.

Testing

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -v

The suite covers HTML cleaning, UTC timestamp handling, keyword matching, the recency window (including undated items), and the dedup/sort/cap pipeline — all with a fixed clock for determinism.

Troubleshooting

MCP client shows "Failed to connect"

The launch command isn't runnable. Either install uv (pip install uv) so uvx works, or use the no-uv path: pip install -e . then register the server as python -m rss_digest_mcp. After changing the client config, start a new session — existing sessions don't pick up new servers.

Windows ARM64: cryptography fails to build / uvx won't connect

On native win-arm64, cryptography ≥ 47 ships no prebuilt wheel, so pip falls back to a Rust source build that needs MSVC link.exe and fails on a clean machine (cryptography arrives transitively via the MCP SDK → pyjwt[crypto]). The uvx --from . launch in Configuration also fails here, because uvx builds the package in a fresh isolated env and ignores the constraints file, re-triggering that same source build.

Use the pip + python -m path instead:

# 1. install, pinned to cryptography's last win-arm64 wheel (46.0.3)
python -m pip install -e . -c constraints-winarm64.txt --only-binary=cryptography

# 2. register with the module launcher (NOT uvx)
claude mcp add -s user rss-digest -- python -m rss_digest_mcp
claude mcp list      # rss-digest ... ✓ connected

Notes:

• The pin is environment-specific — x64 / macOS / Linux have current wheels — so it lives in constraints-winarm64.txt, not in pyproject.toml (which would needlessly hold those platforms back).
• claude mcp add records the absolute path of the python you used. If you later move or replace that interpreter, re-run claude mcp add.
• If you must keep using uvx, pass the constraints via the UV_CONSTRAINT environment variable — but that still rebuilds the isolated env, so the direct python -m launch is lighter and more reliable.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.