For AI agents: The documentation index is at https://docs.digitalocean.com/llms.txt. Markdown versions of pages use the same URL with index.html.md in place of the HTML page (for example, append index.html.md to the directory path instead of opening the HTML document).

The Documentation Search API returns ranked DigitalOcean documentation pages for a keyword query as JSON. It uses the same index and ranking as the docs-search tool on the Documentation MCP server, so both return the same pages. Use it from scripts, IDE plugins, and retrieval pipelines that don’t use MCP. It requires no API token or account.

Endpoint

Send a GET request to the following endpoint:

https://docs.mcp.digitalocean.com/v1/search

The endpoint rejects unknown or repeated parameters with a 400 error.

Example

The following request searches for pages about deploying container images and returns the top two results:

curl 'https://docs.mcp.digitalocean.com/v1/search?q=deploy+from+container+image&limit=2'

The response lists the matching pages in results and describes the search in meta:

{
  "results": [
    {
      "title": "How to Deploy from Container Images",
      "url": "https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/deploy-from-container-images/",
      "markdown_url": "https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/deploy-from-container-images/index.html.md",
      "product": "App Platform",
      "page_type": "how-to",
      "last_modified": "2026-07-13",
      "excerpt": "You can deploy containerized apps to App Platform from supported container registries..."
    },
    {
      "title": "How to Use Container Images for Paperspace Deployments",
      "url": "https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/paperspace/deployments/how-to/use-images/",
      "markdown_url": "https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/paperspace/deployments/how-to/use-images/index.html.md",
      "product": "Paperspace",
      "page_type": "how-to",
      "last_modified": "2023-12-14",
      "excerpt": "Container images are required to run a Paperspace App..."
    }
  ],
  "meta": {
    "query": "deploy from container image",
    "total": 2,
    "pages_searched": 6587,
    "stability": "preview"
  }
}

To read a full page, fetch its markdown_url.

Response Fields

Each object in results has the following fields. Fields without a value are omitted.

The meta object contains query, product (when you set it), total (the number of results returned), pages_searched, and stability.

Ranking uses page titles, descriptions, products, and URLs. Page body text is used for excerpts but not for ranking, so a query for a term that only appears in a page body, such as an exact error string, may not find that page.

Errors

Errors return a JSON body with an id and a message:

Rate Limits

Requests are rate limited per client IP address. When you exceed the limit, the response has status 429 and a Retry-After header with the number of seconds to wait. Successful responses are cached for up to five minutes, so repeating the same query does not return newer results within that window.

To process the whole documentation set, such as to build your own search index, don’t page through search results. Use the bulk feeds instead:

• llms-index.json lists every page with its title, description, product, URL, and last-modified date.
• docs-corpus.jsonl contains page content in chunks, split into shards that you can fetch and update individually.
• Every page has a Markdown version at its URL with index.html.md appended.