upkeep-mcp

An MCP server for the recurring checks behind ongoing website maintenance: domains, SSL certificates, uptime, technical SEO and accessibility — all from publicly available information.

Built for people who look after a portfolio of client sites on a retainer, not just a single domain. The goal is to answer one question quickly: what needs attention this week?

Status

Early development, built in public phase by phase. Everything that needs no browser is implemented and useful today.

It also exposes the portfolio://sites resource (the site list, for a client to read without spending a tool call) and the quarterly_report prompt (turns a portfolio run into the report a client actually reads).

Published on npm, so it installs with one command — see Installation. A public instance is also running, for anyone who would rather point a client at a URL than run anything — see The hosted instance.

What it looks like

> Is example.com about to expire?

example.com expires 2027-08-13 (346 days).
Registrar: RESERVED-Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
Nameservers: elliott.ns.cloudflare.com, hera.ns.cloudflare.com.
Resolves: apex yes, www yes. DNSSEC: delegation signed.

> Check the certificate on expired.badssl.com

expired.badssl.com:443 certificate expires 2015-04-12 (-4159 days).
Issued by COMODO RSA Domain Validation Secure Server CA.
Chain does not verify (CERT_HAS_EXPIRED). Negotiated TLSv1.2.
Host matched via *.badssl.com.
Revocation is not checked.

Needs attention:
- [critical] The certificate expired 4159 days ago.
- [critical] The certificate chain does not verify: CERT_HAS_EXPIRED.

Every tool also returns structured data alongside the text, so results can be sorted, filtered and fed into a report. Full input and output for each tool is in examples/, and a whole portfolio session — the weekly triage, a drill-down, and what the comparison against the previous run will and will not claim — is in examples/conversation.md.

The tools

domain_check

Input: domain — a bare domain, a full URL, or an internationalised name. A subdomain is reduced to its registrable domain, since that is what a registration belongs to.

Returns the expiry date and days remaining, the registrar and its IANA ID, registry statuses, A/AAAA/NS/MX/TXT/CAA records, whether the apex and www resolve, whether the delegation is signed with DNSSEC, and what the domain's SPF and DMARC records say about who may send email as it.

Email authentication is read from the domain's own DNS — the SPF record at the apex, the DMARC record at _dmarc. A record that is absent is reported as information, because it is a standing improvement rather than something that broke this week. A record that is present and wrong is a warning, because it fails right now: two SPF records make receivers skip SPF entirely, and +all authorises the whole internet to send as the domain.

DKIM is deliberately not reported. A DKIM key lives at <selector>._domainkey, and a selector cannot be discovered — only guessed, one DNS query per guess. That is subdomain enumeration, which this project does not do, so a domain with no DKIM and one whose selector was not guessed are left indistinguishable rather than the second being reported as the first.

ssl_check

Input: domain, optional port (443 by default).

Returns expiry and days remaining, issuer, whether the chain verifies and why not when it does not, which hostnames the certificate covers and via which SAN entry, and the negotiated TLS version and cipher. Expired, self-signed and untrusted certificates are inspected and reported rather than refused — those are the ones worth finding.

uptime_check

Input: url — a full URL, or a bare domain, which is tried over HTTPS.

Returns the status code, response time, every hop of the redirect chain, whether plain HTTP is upgraded to HTTPS, the HSTS policy, and the security headers worth reporting on.

seo_audit

Input: url — the page to audit, plus optional checkLinks (true by default) and maxLinks (25 by default).

Returns title and meta description with their lengths, the heading structure, canonical, lang, viewport, Open Graph, hreflang alternates, the images with no alt attribute, the state of robots.txt and the sitemap, and which internal links are broken.

robots.txt is read before anything else is requested and is obeyed — for the page itself and for every internal link. A page this crawler is not allowed to read is reported as such and is never fetched, and an unreadable robots.txt is treated as forbidding everything, as RFC 9309 requires.

> Audit the homepage of example.com

https://example.com/ answered 200. Title: "Example Domain".
1 h1, 0 images without alt, 0 internal links (0 checked, 0 broken).
Sitemap: the sitemap URL answered 404.

Needs attention:
- [warning] The page has no meta description, so search engines will write their own summary of it.
- [info] The page declares no canonical URL, which is how duplicate addresses for the same page get separated.
- [info] The page has no og:title or no og:image, so it will share poorly on social networks and in messaging apps.
- [info] There is no sitemap at https://example.com/sitemap.xml: the sitemap URL answered 404.
- [info] The site publishes no robots.txt. Nothing is blocked, but the sitemap cannot be declared there either.

portfolio_report

Input: sites inline, or file (defaults to sites.json), plus optional checks and tags.

Runs every check across the whole portfolio with bounded concurrency and returns one report ordered by what needs action first: what is down, what expires soonest, what regressed since the last run. A site that cannot be checked becomes a finding, never a failure of the whole report.

> What needs attention across my sites this week?

3 sites checked: 0 critical, 2 warning, 0 unknown, 1 fine.

Needs action:
- [warning] Example Ltd: Plain HTTP does not redirect to HTTPS.
- [warning] Example Ltd: No Strict-Transport-Security header is sent.
- [warning] Example Net: Plain HTTP does not redirect to HTTPS.
- [warning] Example Net: No Strict-Transport-Security header is sent.

Nothing comparable in this session yet, so no change is reported. A run is comparable only against one that measured the same sites the same way.

Nothing to do: Example Foundation.

Each site can set maxLinks — how many internal links the seo check may request, 0 for none. It is the setting that decides what a run costs: measured over twenty sites, the portfolio takes about eight seconds without seo and around forty with it, because link checking is one request per link paced at half a second per host.

The portfolio file format is documented in sites.example.json. Copy it to sites.json — which is gitignored, so a real client list never gets committed. file is resolved against the directory the client started the server in, so give the full path when that directory is not yours.

accessibility_audit

Input: url, plus optional standard (wcag2aa by default; also wcag2a, wcag21aa, wcag22aa, best-practice).

Opens the page in a headless browser and runs axe-core over it. Returns the rules that failed, how many elements failed each, CSS selectors for the first few, and how many rules axe could not decide on its own.

This is the only tool that needs a browser, and it is optional: nothing is downloaded when you install this project. Run npx playwright install chromium once if you want it. Without it the tool says so and names that command, and every other check carries on.

Automated rules find roughly a third of accessibility problems. A page with no violations passed the machine-checkable part, which is not the same as being usable — which is why the count of undecided rules is reported alongside.

Installation

Requires Node.js 22 or newer. Nothing else: installing downloads no browser, and every check works without one except accessibility_audit.

Claude Code

claude mcp add upkeep -- npx -y upkeep-mcp

Claude Desktop

Add the server to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "upkeep": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "upkeep-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart the client and ask it to run the health tool. It answers with the server version, the Node.js version and how long the process has been up.

A desktop client starts a server in a directory of its own choosing, usually /. That matters for one thing only: portfolio_report and the portfolio://sites resource look for sites.json there. Pass sites inline, or give portfolio_report the full path — file: "/Users/you/sites.json".

From source

For development, or to run a branch:

git clone https://github.com/tiagocalado86/upkeep-mcp.git
cd upkeep-mcp
npm install
npm run build
claude mcp add upkeep -- node /absolute/path/to/upkeep-mcp/dist/index.js

The hosted instance

For anyone who cannot or would rather not run a server, there is a public one:

https://upkeep-mcp-1080119881249.europe-west1.run.app/mcp

Point any MCP client that takes a remote server URL at it — in Claude, as a custom connector. Opening the host in a browser gives a plain page saying what it is.

It is a demo. No authentication, no availability promise, no support, and it may be switched off without notice. npx -y upkeep-mcp is the supported way to run this, and it is what you want if these checks matter to your work.

Every tool works there, accessibility_audit included — the image ships a browser, and every request that browser makes goes through the same rules as the rest of the server. Someone who cannot run a server themselves should not get a weaker tool than someone who can.

One thing genuinely differs, and it is a property of running in public rather than a compromise: it contacts only public addresses, and only the web ports — 443, or 80 when checking whether plain HTTP upgrades. So it refuses to check anything on your own network, localhost included. Use the stdio server for those.

Running your own over HTTP

The transport is the same one the hosted instance uses:

npm run build
npm run start:http -- --port 8080

The HTTP entrypoint is not the stdio one with a socket attached: a stranger is not the person who started the process, so it applies the address and port rules above and admits traffic through a per-caller rate limit. docs/deploying.md covers running it on Google Cloud Run, and docs/adr/0012 explains the guard and what it does not close.

Security & privacy

This server never asks for, accepts or stores credentials. It reads only information that any person with a browser or a DNS resolver could read.

• No API keys, tokens or passwords — for any service, ever.
• No intrusive behaviour: no port scanning, no subdomain brute-forcing, no vulnerability probing. It inspects public configuration; it is not an offensive tool.
• robots.txt is respected on any page crawl, with per-host rate limiting and an identifiable User-Agent carrying a contact URL.
• No persistent sensitive state. Caching is in memory only, with a TTL. There is no database and nothing is written to disk.
• The only third parties contacted are the ones that hold the answer: the registry's own RDAP server, IANA's RDAP bootstrap file, and cloudflare-dns.com for the one question node:dns cannot ask (whether a DNSSEC delegation is signed). SECURITY.md lists them and what each one learns.

Limitations

Stated plainly, because a tool that hides what it cannot do is worse than one that does less.

• Certificate revocation is not checked. Node performs no CRL or OCSP lookup, so a revoked certificate is reported as a valid chain. The output says revocationChecked: false rather than implying otherwise.
• Some registries publish no expiry date. .de, .nl, .no, .au and .fi do not publish one over any protocol. The result names the registry and says so, instead of showing an indefinite "unknown". Registration data comes from RDAP only; there is no WHOIS fallback, and docs/adr/0004 explains why.
• DNSSEC is not validated. The tool reports whether a delegation is signed and where it learned that. It never claims to have validated a chain.
• Response time includes connection setup. It is wall clock to the first response headers, covering DNS, TCP and TLS, so it is not a measure of server processing time.
• seo_audit audits one page, not a site. It requests the page's internal links to find broken ones, but it does not crawl: there is no second level. Auditing a site means calling it for the pages that matter.
• The sitemap check is structural, not a schema validation. It establishes that the document exists, declares <urlset> or <sitemapindex>, and how many <loc> entries it holds. It does not validate against the sitemaps.org schema, and it does not open a gzipped sitemap.
• A page nested thousands of levels deep is refused, not audited. HTML parsing costs roughly the square of the nesting depth, so a document built to be absurd would block the server for minutes. seo_audit measures the depth first and reports the refusal.
• Accessibility is only checked as far as a machine can. Automated rules find roughly a third of real problems. The tool reports what axe could not decide rather than counting it as a pass, but no green result here is an accessibility statement.
• Nothing here judges how a page ranks. seo_audit reports what is in the HTML. Rankings depend on things no public endpoint exposes.
• "What changed since last time" lasts as long as the server process. The previous run is held in memory and never written to disk, so a restarted server has nothing to compare against — and says so, rather than implying nothing changed. Only sites both runs measured the same way are compared, so a quick uptime-only pass never invents regressions in the run after it. docs/adr/0011 explains the trade.
• Certificates and domains are judged on different clocks. A registration is a warning inside 30 days; a certificate only inside 14. ACME clients renew with 30 days left, so warning that early would fire on nearly every healthy site.

Documentation

• CONTRIBUTING.md — development setup, and how to add a tool
• docs/architecture.md — how a request flows, and how it is tested without a network
• docs/prior-art.md — the MCP servers that already do parts of this, what they do better, and the gap this one fills
• docs/deploying.md — running the HTTP instance, and what is different about it
• docs/adr/ — one short record per structural decision, including why the browser is optional
• SECURITY.md — threat model and reporting policy
• CHANGELOG.md

License

MIT — see LICENSE.