Reddit blocks wreq's Chrome 145 BoringSSL fingerprint at the JA3/JA4
TLS layer even though our HTTP headers correctly impersonate Chrome.
Curl from the same machine with the same Chrome User-Agent string
returns 200 from Reddit's .json endpoint; webclaw with the Chrome
profile returns 403. The detector clearly fingerprints below the
header layer.
Tested all six vertical extractors with the Firefox profile:
reddit, hackernews, github_repo, pypi, npm, huggingface_model all
return correct typed JSON. Firefox is a strict improvement on the
Chrome default for sites with active TLS-level bot detection, with
no regressions on the API-flavored sites that were already working.
Real fix is per-extractor preferred profile, but the structural
change to allow per-call profile selection in FetchClient is a
larger refactor. Flipping the global default is a one-line change
that ships the unblock now and lets users hit the new
/v1/scrape/{vertical} routes against Reddit immediately.
New extractors module returns site-specific typed JSON instead of
generic markdown. Each extractor:
- declares a URL pattern via matches()
- fetches from the site's official JSON API where one exists
- returns a typed serde_json::Value with documented field names
- exposes an INFO struct that powers the /v1/extractors catalog
First 6 verticals shipped, all hitting public JSON APIs (no HTML
scraping, zero antibot risk):
- reddit → www.reddit.com/*/.json
- hackernews → hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/{id} (full thread in one call)
- github_repo → api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}
- pypi → pypi.org/pypi/{name}/json
- npm → registry.npmjs.org/{name} + downloads/point/last-week
- huggingface_model → huggingface.co/api/models/{owner}/{name}
Server-side routes added:
- POST /v1/scrape/{vertical} explicit per-vertical extraction
- GET /v1/extractors catalog (name, label, description, url_patterns)
The dispatcher validates that URL matches the requested vertical
before running, so users get "URL doesn't match the X extractor"
instead of opaque parse failures inside the extractor.
17 unit tests cover URL matching + path parsing for each vertical.
Live tests against canonical URLs (rust-lang/rust, requests pypi,
react npm, whisper-large-v3 hf, item 8863 hn, an r/micro_saas post)
all return correct typed JSON in 100-300ms. Sample sizes: github
863B, npm 700B, pypi 1.7KB, hf 3.2KB, hn 38KB (full comment tree).
Marketing positioning: Firecrawl charges 5 credits per /extract call
and you write the schema. Webclaw returns the same JSON in 1 credit
per /scrape/{vertical} call with hand-written deterministic
extractors per site.
Self-hosters hitting docs/self-hosting were promised three binaries
but the OSS Docker image only shipped two. webclaw-server lived in
the closed-source hosted-platform repo, which couldn't be opened. This
adds a minimal axum REST API in the OSS repo so self-hosting actually
works without pretending to ship the cloud platform.
Crate at crates/webclaw-server/. Stateless, no database, no job queue,
single binary. Endpoints: GET /health, POST /v1/{scrape, crawl, map,
batch, extract, summarize, diff, brand}. JSON shapes mirror
api.webclaw.io for the endpoints OSS can support, so swapping between
self-hosted and hosted is a base-URL change.
Auth: optional bearer token via WEBCLAW_API_KEY / --api-key. Comparison
is constant-time (subtle::ConstantTimeEq). Open mode (no key) is
allowed and binds 127.0.0.1 by default; the Docker image flips
WEBCLAW_HOST=0.0.0.0 so the container is reachable out of the box.
Hard caps to keep naive callers from OOMing the process: crawl capped
at 500 pages synchronously, batch capped at 100 URLs / 20 concurrent.
For unbounded crawls or anti-bot bypass the docs point users at the
hosted API.
Dockerfile + Dockerfile.ci updated to copy webclaw-server into
/usr/local/bin and EXPOSE 3000. Workspace version bumped to 0.4.0
(new public binary).
