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Documentation Tools

Documentation tools provide full-text search and section retrieval for the EnergyPlus documentation hosted on docs.idfkit.com.

Documentation URLs Resource

Documentation URLs for any object type are available via the idfkit://docs/{object_type} MCP resource. It returns links to:

  • I/O Reference page (with anchor to the specific object)
  • Engineering Reference landing page
  • Search page

search_docs

Full-text search across the EnergyPlus documentation index (~20,000 sections).

Results include HTML-stripped text truncated to 150 characters. Use get_doc_section to read full content.

Parameters:

  • query (required): search terms (e.g., "zone heat balance")
  • version: EnergyPlus version as "X.Y" (default: latest)
  • tags: filter by documentation set
  • limit: max results (default: 5)

Available tags:

  • Compliance
  • Engineering Reference
  • External Interfaces
  • Getting Started
  • Input Output Reference
  • Module Developer
  • Output Details
  • Plant Application Guide

get_doc_section

Retrieve the full content of a specific documentation section by its location key.

Parameters:

  • location (required): the location from a search_docs result
  • version: EnergyPlus version as "X.Y" (default: latest)
  • max_length: maximum characters to return (default: 8000)

Returns the text with HTML stripped, truncated to max_length characters.

Typical Flows

Find docs for an object type

Read the idfkit://docs/Zone resource.

Search and read documentation

  1. search_docs(query="zone heat balance", tags="Engineering Reference")
  2. Pick a result by its location
  3. get_doc_section(location="engineering-reference/.../#section")

Browse a specific documentation set

search_docs(query="infiltration", tags="Input Output Reference", limit=10)

First-Use Download

On first use, search_docs and get_doc_section download the documentation search index from docs.idfkit.com (~2 MB) and cache it locally. The cache is refreshed automatically after 7 days.

Sources are checked in order:

  1. IDFKIT_DOCS_DIR environment variable (path to a local idfkit-docs/dist/ directory)
  2. Local cache (~/.cache/idfkit/docs/ on Linux, ~/Library/Caches/idfkit/docs/ on macOS)
  3. Download from https://docs.idfkit.com

Set IDFKIT_DOCS_DIR for offline use or to point at a local docs build.