Delv
Official (Vendor)Active· 6d★ 4.3by AWS

AWS Documentation

AWS Labs' Documentation MCP. Real-time, scoped access to AWS docs, API references, and What's New posts. Stops the agent guessing IAM syntax.

View repo Homepage
A+
Safety & Trust

Delv Safety Grade: A+

Score 93/100 · assessed 2026-04-18

Maintainer95
Permissions95
Supply chain90
Transparency92
Incidents100

AWS Documentation MCP is a read-only documentation lookup server from AWS Labs, the experimental arm of Amazon Web Services. It queries official AWS documentation, API references, and What's New announcements without touching your infrastructure or credentials. The server is distributed via PyPI with standard uvx installation, open-sourced under Apache 2.0, and maintained by AWS's own engineering teams. The only environment variable required is AWS_DOCUMENTATION_PARTITION, which selects the documentation region (aws, aws-cn, aws-us-gov) rather than granting access to your account. Permissions are strictly network outbound to fetch documentation and no filesystem or shell access is involved. The supply chain is clean: official AWS package namespace, versioned releases, and transparent GitHub repository with active maintenance. No security incidents on record. This is as safe as third-party tooling gets: a major cloud vendor providing read-only access to their own public documentation corpus.

Green flags

  • Official AWS Labs project with institutional backing and maintenance
  • Read-only documentation access, no AWS account credentials required
  • Distributed via PyPI under awslabs namespace with versioned releases
  • Apache 2.0 licensed with full source transparency on GitHub
  • Prevents IAM policy syntax errors by providing canonical references

Red flags

  • AWS Labs designation means experimental status, not core AWS product support
  • Requires network access to AWS documentation endpoints
  • Documentation partition env var could be misconfigured for region

Permissions requested

Outbound network
Assessed by Delv Editorial using public metadata. Grades are advisory and update as the ecosystem changes. They do not replace your own review of permissions and code before granting an agent access to sensitive systems.

Install

uvx awslabs.aws-documentation-mcp-server@latest
Env vars needed: AWS_DOCUMENTATION_PARTITION

Review

AWS Documentation is an MCP server that pipes official AWS docs, API references, and What's New announcements straight into your Claude session. Instead of tabbing out to search for the correct IAM policy syntax or the latest Lambda runtime parameters, you ask Claude and it pulls the current, canonical answer from AWS's own documentation corpus. I'd reach for this when writing Terraform modules or debugging CloudFormation templates. The IAM policy lookup is the killer feature: you can ask for the exact structure of a condition block or the valid values for an S3 bucket policy element, and Claude returns the official schema without hallucinating deprecated keys. The What's New integration is surprisingly useful too. Before recommending a service to a client, I'll ask Claude to summarise recent announcements for that service, and it surfaces breaking changes or new features I'd otherwise miss. The partition environment variable is mandatory. Set it to 'aws' for commercial regions, 'aws-cn' for China, or 'aws-us-gov' for GovCloud. Without it, the server won't start. The scoped access model means you're not dumping the entire AWS documentation library into context; Claude fetches only the relevant pages per query, which keeps responses fast and focused. Quirks: it's read-only, so you can't update docs or submit corrections through the MCP. The server assumes you're online; there's no offline cache. If you're working in an air-gapped environment, this won't help. The What's New posts are useful for recent changes, but the server doesn't index historical announcements older than a few months, so don't expect a complete changelog for a service launched in 2018. Who shouldn't bother: if you're not writing AWS infrastructure code or debugging AWS API calls, this is overkill. Frontend developers or data scientists who occasionally spin up an S3 bucket won't get enough value to justify the setup. But if you're a platform engineer, DevOps lead, or solutions architect who lives in CloudFormation and CDK, this is a permanent addition to your Claude config.
Verdict

Install this if you write AWS infrastructure code daily and you're tired of Claude inventing IAM syntax. Skip it if you only touch AWS once a quarter or you prefer the AWS CLI's built-in help text. The partition variable requirement is a small price for always-current documentation.

Good at

  • Stops Claude hallucinating IAM syntax or deprecated API parameters by fetching official AWS docs on demand.
  • What's New integration surfaces recent service changes you'd otherwise miss when recommending or refactoring AWS resources.
  • Scoped fetching keeps context lean; it doesn't dump the entire AWS documentation library into every query.
  • First-party AWS Labs project, so the documentation source is canonical and the server gets updated when AWS changes its docs structure.

Watch out

  • Requires an internet connection; no offline cache, so it's useless in air-gapped or low-connectivity environments.
  • Partition environment variable is mandatory and non-obvious; forget to set it and the server silently fails to start.
  • What's New posts only cover recent months, so you can't query historical announcements for older services or features.
  • Read-only access means you can't submit corrections or flag outdated examples through the MCP, even if you spot an error.

Use cases

  • Looking up an IAM policy element on demand
  • Citing the right API call in a refactor
  • Reading What's New posts before recommending a service
  • Cross-checking deprecated endpoints

Getting started

1. Run 'uvx awslabs.aws-documentation-mcp-server@latest' to install the server. 2. Add the server to your Claude Desktop config (on macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json) with the command and set the AWS_DOCUMENTATION_PARTITION environment variable to 'aws', 'aws-cn', or 'aws-us-gov' depending on your region. 3. Restart Claude Desktop and ask it to look up an IAM policy element or a recent What's New post for a service you use. 4. Verify it works by checking that Claude cites specific AWS documentation URLs in its response. 5. Watch out: the server needs an internet connection to fetch docs, so it won't work offline or in air-gapped environments.

Works with

Claude DesktopClaude CodeCursorVS Code

Similar MCPs