Octocrawl

Octocrawl

One link. Web data, ready.

Markdown and data from web pages, for AI agents and RAG.

Fewer tokens than raw HTML. Every result records how it was read.

Website · Docs · Connect MCP · Blog · Changelog

Scrape pages. Crawl websites. Turn web content into usable data.

Octocrawl is an open-source web scraping and crawling toolkit for AI agents, RAG and research. Collect documentation for a knowledge base, extract product details for comparison, or turn web tables and listings into data for analysis. Each page comes with a source record.

Try a page in your browser, or connect your agent through hosted MCP or the REST API. No installation or API key is needed to try the hosted service.

What can you do with Octocrawl?

Hosted Octocrawl offers scrape and map, and with an account crawl and batch jobs (up to 500 pages a crawl, 1,000 URLs a batch); keyless requests use HTTP, and an account key enables the browser lane. Run locally for larger jobs, page actions and Monitors; see Running Octocrawl for setup and self-hosting options. The web preview is a single-page trial, with five pages a day and up to 20 named fields.

Why Octocrawl?

• Web data inside your agent. Connect Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode or Codex through MCP, or build with REST, TypeScript, Python and the Vercel AI SDK.
• Structured fields without a model by default. Read supported values from the page itself, with field evidence and explicit missing values. Model fallback is opt-in.
• Know when a scrape fell short. Checks flag challenge pages, wrong content, missing facts, truncation and too little content. Blocked and failed results carry a reason; fetched error pages keep their status and Markdown. Result states.
• Trace results back to their sources. Each page carries an Evidence Record with its URL, fetch time, status and extraction evidence. Unobserved values stay null.
• Run it where you need it. Use the hosted service, run with npx, or self-host with Docker Compose. The server is AGPL-3.0; the client libraries are MIT.

If Octocrawl helps your work, give the repository a star.

Quick start

Connect your agent to hosted Octocrawl. No key is needed to start (steps for Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode and Codex):

claude mcp add --transport http octocrawl https://mcp.octocrawl.dev/mcp

Without a key it reads 20 pages a day over HTTP. For more, sign in and make a key: an account gets 1,000 credits a month and the browser lane. The key goes in a header, never in the URL:

claude mcp add --transport http octocrawl https://mcp.octocrawl.dev/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer oc_…"

Or run it on your own computer. You need Node.js 22.13+ or 24+:

npx octocrawl scrape https://example.com --markdown

pip install 'octocrawl-client[pandas]' # the Python client of a running API (npx octocrawl serve); [pandas] for to_pandas() npm install @octocrawl/sdk # the TypeScript client; @octocrawl/mcp is the MCP server npm install @octocrawl/ai-sdk # scrape and map as Vercel AI SDK tools, on hosted Octocrawl by default

Pages are read over HTTP first. For pages that only appear in a browser, install Chromium once with npx playwright install chromium; until then such a page comes back with a browser_not_installed warning that names the command.

To give your agent every tool, with no daily limit, run the API locally and connect the MCP server to it:

npx octocrawl serve                                  # keep it running: the API on 127.0.0.1:8787

claude mcp add octocrawl -- npx -y @octocrawl/mcp # the published stdio server, a client of that API

The hosted service offers scrape and map, and with an account crawl and batch jobs. The local server adds larger jobs, the Amazon.sg product tool and the Monitor tools. To serve other machines yourself, npx octocrawl serve --hosted --token refuses private addresses, robots overrides and saved logins as the hosted service does. Running Octocrawl covers all three; Docker Compose runs one on your own server. An agent installing Octocrawl for you (Cline, for one) can follow llms-install.md.

What a failure looks like

The test page below answers HTTP 200 but shows a Cloudflare check instead of content (fixture block-challenge-200). A crawler that trusts the status code counts it as a success. Octocrawl tries plain HTTP, then a browser, and reports the page as blocked, with what to do next:

npx octocrawl scrape http://127.0.0.1:8799/block/challenge-200

{

"status": "blocked", "blockReason": "cloudflare_challenge", "channelsTried": ["http", "browser_local"], "markdown": null, "snapshot": { "httpStatus": 200, "artifacts": [] }, "usage": { "wallMs": 1079, "bytesWire": null, "externalCostUsd": 0 }, "agentHints": [ "127.0.0.1 gates automated access on the lanes tried (http, browser_local); … a proxy or session you own is the supported route, or, on your own machine, getting through the check yourself in your own Chrome: handoff: true on a scrape (octocrawl scrape --handoff) …" ], "evidenceRecord": { "schemaVersion": "w2l.evidence/1", "status": "blocked", "reason": "cloudflare_challenge", "lane": "browser_local", "…": "…" } }

This is real output of octocrawl 0.4.1, trimmed (…) and rounded, against the repository's fixture server (FIXTURE_PORT=8799 node --import tsx packages/fixtures/src/cli.ts). bytesWire: null means wire bytes were not measured; artifacts: [] means no screenshot or DOM snapshot was made.

Documentation

The site's docs at octocrawl.dev/docs cover MCP setup for four clients, task guides and limits. They are built from apps/public-web/content.

The full reference lives in docs/:

Walkthroughs of real runs are on the blog: Claude Code web scraping with MCP, Web scraping for RAG, Find all pages on a website, Scrape a website with login, in your own Chrome, Extract structured data without an LLM, Scrape a list of URLs and keep every failure.

For researchers, two guides walk through a real run: From a URL list to a CSV with evidence and Citing web data in a paper.

For the Monitor → result → HTTPS event → restart workflow, follow the onboarding guide.

Work on the code

You need Node.js 22.13+ or 24+ and npm. The PDF engine, pdf.js, needs 22.13 or later.

git clone https://github.com/77777R7/Octocrawl.git

cd Octocrawl npm ci npx playwright install chromium npm run typecheck npm test npm run scrape -- https://example.com --markdown npm run crawl -- https://example.com --max-pages 20

The packag