shared-url-mcp

An MCP server with one job: read a shared AI conversation link and write the whole thing to Markdown.

It exists because ordinary web-fetch tools fail on these links, and they each fail for a different reason:

Share link	What a normal fetch gets	What this does instead
claude.ai/share/...	a 4 KB Cloudflare challenge shell with no conversation in it	reads claude.ai/api/chat_snapshots/<id>, which returns clean JSON
chatgpt.com/share/...	500 KB of HTML with the messages buried in an index-deduplicated string table	reads chatgpt.com/backend-api/share/<id>, which returns clean JSON
gemini.google.com/share/...	an Angular shell containing zero conversation text	renders the page and waits for the transcript to arrive
chat.deepseek.com/share/...	HTTP 202 with an empty body, from AWS WAF bot protection	retries in a real browser window, which the challenge lets through

Works with any MCP-capable agent CLI: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf, Zed, and anything else that speaks MCP over stdio. Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Install

git clone https://github.com/AbdoKnbGit/shared_url_mcp.git
cd shared_url_mcp
npm run setup

That is the whole install. npm run setup installs dependencies, builds, sorts out a browser, and registers the server with every agent CLI it finds:

3. Wiring agent CLIs
  ✓ Claude Code: registered (all projects)
  ✓ Codex: registered in ~/.codex/config.toml
  ✓ OpenCode: registered in ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json
  ✓ Cursor: registered in ~/.cursor/mcp.json
  · Windsurf: not installed, skipped

Restart your CLI afterwards, since MCP servers are loaded at startup. Then paste a link:

read this: https://chatgpt.com/share/<id>

Preview without changing anything:

npm run setup -- --list

Browsers are handled for you

Most links never need one. For the pages that do, the server drives an installed Chrome or Edge if you have either, and downloads Chromium by itself the first time it needs to otherwise. There is nothing to install by hand.

Updating

npm run update

That pulls, reinstalls, and rebuilds in place. Every client you wired points at the same dist/index.js, so they all pick up the new version the next time they start. No reconfiguration, and no need to re-run setup.

Re-run npm run setup only when you want to wire a CLI you installed later.

Tools

Two, deliberately.

read_shared_link

Fetches the link, saves the full conversation, and hands the agent a skeleton rather than the transcript: the title, the message count, and an outline of every turn with its line number.

# Predict Admission Status

16 messages from Gemini, model 3.1 Pro, 43,138 characters.

## Outline
  1. line    24  User      please construct the full text from these images
  2. line    31  Assistant Here is the complete text reconstructed from the...
  3. line   142  User      here's the continuation

So the agent knows what the conversation is and where everything sits, then reads only what a question actually needs: those exact lines, a search for one term, or the whole file. Nothing is truncated. The complete session is in conversation.md; the skeleton just lets the agent read it on demand instead of swallowing it whole.

inspect_shared_link

Read-only check: which provider, where the link redirects, whether it is still reachable, and whether a browser is needed. Use it to diagnose a link that failed instead of retrying a full extraction.

Output

shared-url/
└── gemini-predict-admission-status/
    ├── conversation.md
    └── metadata.json

conversation.md holds YAML front matter and the full transcript, one ## section per message, with reasoning in collapsed blocks and code in fenced blocks. metadata.json holds the same facts in structured form plus an outline mapping every message to its line number.