reddit-mcp

Read Reddit from Claude without an API key. No app registration, no account.

Reddit's data API is effectively closed. New apps need a stated moderation use case and manual approval, anonymous .json access is blocked, and the free tier that third-party tools were built on is gone. Most "Reddit for LLMs" integrations now start with a credentials dance you can't complete.

Reddit still publishes public Atom/RSS feeds for every subreddit, thread, user and search. This is a small local MCP server that reads those feeds and hands Claude the fields that matter: browse a subreddit, read a thread and its comments, search across the site.

Those feeds are published to be fetched, which is why this keeps working. It reads a supported path in a format frozen since 2005, so there is no markup to break when Reddit ships its next redesign.

What you don't get: scores, upvote ratios, comment counts. Those exist only in the gated API, and nothing here fakes them. Titles, authors, timestamps, and the full text of posts and comments all come through.

Install

reddit-rss-mcp is on PyPI (the plain reddit-mcp name belongs to an unrelated project). You need uv on your machine; it handles Python and dependencies itself, and there is nothing else to set up.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add reddit -s user -- uvx reddit-rss-mcp

Verify with claude mcp list (should show reddit: ✓ Connected). If Claude can't find uvx, use its absolute path (which uvx) instead of the bare command.

Claude Desktop, one click: download reddit-rss-mcp.mcpb from the latest release and drag it into Settings → Extensions. No JSON editing, no absolute paths. (It runs uvx reddit-rss-mcp, so uv still needs to be on your PATH.)

Claude Desktop & Cowork, manual config: add this to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json, using the absolute path from which uvx (the app doesn't inherit your shell PATH):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "reddit": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/uvx",
      "args": ["reddit-rss-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

If the file already has other top-level keys, add mcpServers alongside them rather than overwriting the file. Then:

1. Fully quit the app (Cmd+Q, not just closing the window). The running app rewrites this file, so an edit made while it's open can be discarded.
2. Relaunch. It may take a couple of restarts before the server registers.
3. Grant permission when the app prompts to run the server.

Don't use a Custom Connector (the "add server by URL" option) for a local server. Those are dialed from Anthropic's cloud and can't reach localhost, no matter the cert or tunnel. The config-file method above spawns the server on your own machine, which is what works.

Tools

fetch_json is deliberately not a general web fetcher. URLs on other hosts are refused unless you start the server with REDDIT_MCP_ALLOW_ANY_URL=1, so an unrelated fetch tool doesn't sit in Claude's tool list waiting to be picked at the wrong moment.

Other ways to install

From GitHub (latest main, no clone)

To run unreleased changes, point uvx at the repo and the reddit-rss-mcp entry point. Append @v1.1.2 (or any tag) to pin a release instead of tracking main:

claude mcp add reddit -s user -- uvx --from git+https://github.com/jorgen-k/reddit-mcp reddit-rss-mcp

From a local clone

Prefer this if you want to edit the code:

git clone https://github.com/jorgen-k/reddit-mcp.git
cd reddit-mcp
claude mcp add reddit -s user -- uv --directory "$(pwd)" run server.py

For Claude Desktop & Cowork, the same config file as above, with absolute paths from which uv and pwd:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "reddit": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/uv",
      "args": ["--directory", "/absolute/path/to/reddit-mcp", "run", "server.py"]
    }
  }
}

Updating after a code change

The server is a long-lived process, spawned once when the client connects. Editing server.py does not hot-reload it; the running process keeps the old code until it's restarted.

• Claude Code: run /mcp, select reddit, and reconnect it (or restart Claude Code).
• Claude Desktop & Cowork: fully quit the app (Cmd+Q) and relaunch.

Limits worth knowing

Read-only, public content only. Be considerate with request volume; these are public feeds.

No scores, vote counts, or comment counts. RSS doesn't carry them. For those you need Reddit's Data API, which now requires a moderation use case and approval.

Rate limiting. Reddit throttles unauthenticated RSS aggressively. On an HTTP 429 the server retries with backoff, honoring the Retry-After header when present and otherwise sleeping roughly 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 seconds (plus jitter) across up to 7 retries. It also keeps a minimum gap between outbound requests to avoid tripping the limit in the first place. All tools share this.

Search is only as good as Reddit's search. search_reddit uses Reddit's own search engine; RSS is just the output format, so results match the website, not a separate weaker index. That engine has real limits:

• It doesn't search comment text, only post titles and bodies (and community names). A term that appears only in a comment won't be found.
• Very new posts lag, because indexing isn't instant. To catch brand-new posts reliably, use browse_subreddit(sort="new").
• It isn't exhaustive. Low-relevance results get dropped or buried.

So "no results" means Reddit's search didn't surface it, not that it was never posted.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.