webclaw

Most web scraping tools give your agent one of two bad outputs:

• a blocked page, login wall, or empty app shell
• raw HTML full of nav, scripts, styling, ads, and duplicated boilerplate

webclaw.io is the hosted web extraction API for webclaw. This repo contains the open-source CLI, MCP server, extraction engine, and self-hostable server.

webclaw turns a URL into clean content your tools can actually use.

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webclaw https://example.com --format markdown

mdCopy code
# Example Domain

This domain is for use in illustrative examples in documents.

You may use this domain in literature without prior coordination or asking for permission.

Use it from the terminal, wire it into Claude/Cursor through MCP, call the hosted API from your app, or self-host the OSS server.

Install

Agent setup

The fastest way to connect webclaw to Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenCode, Codex CLI, and other MCP-compatible tools:

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npx create-webclaw

The installer detects supported clients and configures the MCP server for you.

Homebrew

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brew tap 0xMassi/webclaw
brew install webclaw

Prebuilt binaries

Download macOS and Linux binaries from GitHub Releases.

Docker

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docker run --rm ghcr.io/0xmassi/webclaw https://example.com

Cargo

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cargo install --git https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw.git webclaw-cli
cargo install --git https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw.git webclaw-mcp

If building from source fails because native build tools are missing, install the platform prerequisites:

Quick Start

Scrape one page

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webclaw https://stripe.com --format markdown

Return LLM-optimized text

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webclaw https://docs.anthropic.com --format llm

Keep only the main content

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webclaw https://example.com/blog/post --only-main-content

Include or exclude selectors

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webclaw https://example.com \
  --include "article, main, .content" \
  --exclude "nav, footer, .sidebar, .ad"

Crawl a documentation site

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webclaw https://docs.rust-lang.org --crawl --depth 2 --max-pages 50

Extract brand assets

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webclaw https://github.com --brand

Compare a page over time

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webclaw https://example.com/pricing --format json > pricing-old.json
webclaw https://example.com/pricing --diff-with pricing-old.json

MCP Server

webclaw ships with an MCP server for AI agents.

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npx create-webclaw

Manual config:

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{
  "mcpServers": {
    "webclaw": {
      "command": "~/.webclaw/webclaw-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Then ask your agent things like:

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Scrape these competitor pricing pages and summarize the differences.

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Crawl this documentation site and prepare clean context for a RAG index.

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Extract the brand colors, fonts, and logos from this company website.

Tools

SDKs

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npm install @webclaw/sdk
pip install webclaw
go get github.com/0xMassi/webclaw-go

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import { Webclaw } from "@webclaw/sdk";

const client = new Webclaw({ apiKey: process.env.WEBCLAW_API_KEY! });

const page = await client.scrape({
  url: "https://example.com",
  formats: ["markdown"],
  only_main_content: true,
});

console.log(page.markdown);

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from webclaw import Webclaw

client = Webclaw(api_key="wc_your_key")

page = client.scrape(
    "https://example.com",
    formats=["markdown"],
    only_main_content=True,
)

print(page.markdown)

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curl -X POST https://api.webclaw.io/v1/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBCLAW_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "formats": ["markdown"],
    "only_main_content": true
  }'

Output Formats

Local First, Hosted When Needed

The CLI and MCP server work locally without an account for the core extraction path.

Use the hosted API at webclaw.io when you need:

• protected-site access without managing infrastructure
• JavaScript rendering
• async crawl and research jobs
• web search
• watches and production usage tracking
• SDKs for application code

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export WEBCLAW_API_KEY=wc_your_key

webclaw https://example.com --cloud

What You Can Build

Architecture

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webclaw/
  crates/
    webclaw-core     HTML to markdown, text, JSON, and LLM-ready output
    webclaw-fetch    Fetching, crawling, batching, and mapping
    webclaw-llm      Local and hosted LLM provider support
    webclaw-pdf      PDF text extraction
    webclaw-mcp      MCP server for AI agents
    webclaw-cli      Command-line interface

webclaw-core is pure extraction logic: no network I/O, small surface area, and usable independently from the fetching layer.

Configuration

Contributing

The most useful contributions right now are practical and small:

• add examples for real agent and RAG workflows
• improve SDK snippets
• report pages that extract poorly
• add failing fixtures for messy HTML
• improve docs for MCP clients and local setup
• test the CLI on more Linux/macOS environments

Good first places to start:

• Good first issues
• Open a bug report
• Start a discussion

If a page extracts badly, include:

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URL:
Command or API request:
Expected output:
Actual output:
Format used: markdown / llm / text / json / html
CLI, MCP, SDK, or API:

Please remove secrets, cookies, private tokens, and customer data from logs before posting.

Contributors

Thanks to everyone improving webclaw through issues, examples, docs, bug reports, and pull requests.

Star History

License

AGPL-3.0