webclaw/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to webclaw are documented here. Format follows Keep a Changelog.

[0.2.0] — 2026-03-26

Added

• DOCX extraction: auto-detected by Content-Type or URL extension, outputs markdown with headings
• XLSX/XLS extraction: spreadsheets converted to markdown tables, multi-sheet support via calamine
• CSV extraction: parsed with quoted field handling, output as markdown table
• HTML output format: -f html returns sanitized HTML from the extracted content
• Multi-URL watch: --watch now works with --urls-file to monitor multiple URLs in parallel
• Batch + LLM extraction: --extract-prompt and --extract-json now work with multiple URLs
• Scheduled batch watch: watch multiple URLs with aggregate change reports and per-URL diffs

---

[0.1.7] — 2026-03-26

Fixed

• --only-main-content, --include, and --exclude now work in batch mode (#3)

---

[0.1.6] — 2026-03-26

Added

• --watch: monitor a URL for changes at a configurable interval with diff output
• --watch-interval: seconds between checks (default: 300)
• --on-change: run a command when changes are detected (diff JSON piped to stdin)
• --webhook: POST JSON notifications on crawl/batch complete and watch changes. Auto-formats for Discord and Slack webhooks

---

[0.1.5] — 2026-03-26

Added

• --output-dir: save each page to a separate file instead of stdout. Works with single URL, crawl, and batch modes
• CSV input with custom filenames: url,filename format in --urls-file
• Root URLs use hostname/index.ext to avoid collisions in batch mode
• Subdirectories created automatically from URL path structure

---

[0.1.4] — 2026-03-26

Added

• QuickJS integration for extracting data from inline JavaScript (NYTimes +168%, Wired +580% more content)
• Executes inline <script> tags in a sandboxed runtime to capture window.__* data blobs
• Parses Next.js RSC flight data (self.__next_f) for App Router sites
• Smart text filtering rejects CSS, base64, file paths, and code — only keeps readable prose
• Feature-gated with quickjs feature flag (enabled by default, disable for WASM builds)

---

[0.1.3] — 2026-03-25

Added

• Crawl streaming: real-time progress on stderr as pages complete ([2/50] OK https://... (234ms, 1523 words))
• Crawl resume/cancel: --crawl-state <path> saves progress on Ctrl+C and resumes from where it left off
• MCP server proxy support via WEBCLAW_PROXY and WEBCLAW_PROXY_FILE env vars

Changed

• Crawl results now expose visited set and remaining frontier for accurate state persistence

---

[0.1.2] — 2026-03-25

Changed

• Default TLS profile switched from Chrome145/Win to Safari26/Mac (highest pass rate across CF-protected sites)
• Plain client fallback: when impersonated TLS gets connection error or 403, automatically retries without impersonation (fixes ycombinator.com, producthunt.com, and similar sites)

Fixed

• Reddit scraping: use plain HTTP client for .json endpoint (TLS fingerprinting was getting blocked)

Added

• YouTube transcript extraction infrastructure in webclaw-core (caption track parsing, timed text XML parser) — wired up when cloud API launches

---

[0.1.1] — 2026-03-24

Fixed

• MCP server now identifies as webclaw-mcp instead of rmcp in the MCP handshake
• Research tool polling caps at 200 iterations (~10 min) instead of looping forever
• CLI returns non-zero exit codes on errors (invalid format, fetch failures, missing LLM)
• Text format output strips markdown table syntax (| --- | pipes)
• All MCP tools validate URLs before network calls with clear error messages
• Cloud API HTTP client has 60s timeout instead of no timeout
• Local fetch calls timeout after 30s to prevent hanging on slow servers
• Diff cloud fallback computes actual diff instead of returning raw scrape JSON
• FetchClient startup failure logs and exits gracefully instead of panicking

Added

• Upper bounds: batch capped at 100 URLs, crawl capped at 500 pages

---

[0.1.0] — 2026-03-18

First public release. Full-featured web content extraction toolkit for LLMs.

Core Extraction

• Readability-style content scoring with text density, semantic tags, and link density penalties
• Exact CSS class token noise filtering with body-force fallback for SPAs
• HTML → markdown conversion with URL resolution, image alt text, srcset optimization
• 9-step LLM text optimization pipeline (67% token reduction vs raw HTML)
• JSON data island extraction (React, Next.js, Contentful CMS)
• YouTube transcript extraction (title, channel, views, duration, description)
• Lazy-loaded image detection (data-src, data-lazy-src, data-original)
• Brand identity extraction (name, colors, fonts, logos, OG image)
• Content change tracking / diff engine
• CSS selector filtering (include/exclude)

Fetching & Crawling

• TLS fingerprint impersonation via Impit (Chrome 142, Firefox 144, random mode)
• BFS same-origin crawler with configurable depth, concurrency, and delay
• Sitemap.xml and robots.txt discovery
• Batch multi-URL concurrent extraction
• Per-request proxy rotation from pool file
• Reddit JSON API and LinkedIn post extractors

LLM Integration

• Provider chain: Ollama (local-first) → OpenAI → Anthropic
• JSON schema extraction (structured data from pages)
• Natural language prompt extraction
• Page summarization with configurable sentence count

PDF

• PDF text extraction via pdf-extract
• Auto-detection by Content-Type header

MCP Server

• 8 tools: scrape, crawl, map, batch, extract, summarize, diff, brand
• stdio transport for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and any MCP client
• Smart Fetch: local extraction first, cloud API fallback

CLI

• 4 output formats: markdown, JSON, plain text, LLM-optimized
• CSS selector filtering, crawling, sitemap discovery
• Brand extraction, content diffing, LLM features
• Browser profile selection, proxy support, stdin/file input

Infrastructure

• Docker multi-stage build with Ollama sidecar
• Deploy script for Hetzner VPS