man-mcp-server is an MCP server that gives AI assistants direct access to Linux man pages, letting them search, retrieve, and explore your machine's own system documentation instead of relying on the model's general knowledge of command syntax and flags.

Use it when you want an AI assistant to look up exact, local man-page documentation: finding pages about a topic like permissions or networking, pulling a specific page such as ls, or resolving a section-specific lookup like chmod from section 1 versus printf from section 3, the C library, when a command name collides across sections. It requires Linux with a standard man page system and the man and apropos commands available, so it is not usable on systems without a real man-page installation, and it reflects whatever documentation is actually installed locally rather than a canonical online source.

search_man_pages searches man pages by keyword or command name using apropos, get_man_page retrieves the full content of a specific page by name with an optional section number, and list_man_sections lists all available man page sections, 1 through 9, with their descriptions. Retrieved content is cleanly formatted for AI consumption, operations run asynchronously with timeout protection, man pages are exposed as MCP resources addressable via man:// URIs, and errors fall back gracefully rather than failing hard.

Clone the repository and choose one of three setups. With uv, the recommended path:

git clone https://github.com/guyru/man-mcp.git
cd man-mcp
uv sync

Or with pip (pip install .), or build an MCPB bundle for Claude Desktop integration (make build). For VS Code, register it as a stdio server, for example running it via uv:

{
  "servers": {
    "man-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--directory", "/path/to/man-mcp", "server/main.py"]
    }
  }
}

A Python-only variant is also supported, running server/main.py directly with PYTHONPATH set to the project's lib directory.

Developers and sysadmins who want an AI assistant to answer command-line questions from their machine's actual installed documentation, instead of guessing flags and syntax from general training knowledge.