webclaw/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

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

[0.5.1] — 2026-04-22

Added

• webclaw_fetch::Fetcher trait. Vertical extractors now consume &dyn Fetcher instead of &FetchClient directly. The trait exposes three methods (fetch, fetch_with_headers, cloud) covering everything extractors need. Callers that already held a FetchClient keep working unchanged: FetchClient implements Fetcher, blanket impls cover &T and Arc<T>, so &client coerces to &dyn Fetcher automatically.

  The motivation is the split between OSS (wreq-backed, in-process TLS fingerprinting) and the production API server at api.webclaw.io (which cannot use in-process fingerprinting per the architecture rule, and must delegate HTTP through the Go tls-sidecar). Before this trait, adding vertical routes to the production server would have required importing wreq into its dependency graph, violating the separation. Now the production server can provide its own TlsSidecarFetcher implementation and pass it to the same extractor dispatcher the OSS server uses.

  Backwards compatible. No behavior change for CLI, MCP, or OSS self-host.

Changed

• All 28 extractor extract() signatures migrated from client: &FetchClient to client: &dyn Fetcher. The dispatcher functions (extractors::dispatch_by_url, extractors::dispatch_by_name) and the cloud escalation helpers (cloud::smart_fetch, cloud::smart_fetch_html) follow the same change. Tests and call sites are unchanged because &FetchClient auto-coerces.

---

[0.5.0] — 2026-04-22

Added

• 28 vertical extractors that return typed JSON instead of generic markdown. New webclaw_fetch::extractors module with one extractor per site. Dev: reddit, hackernews, github_repo / github_pr / github_issue / github_release, crates_io, pypi, npm. AI/ML: huggingface_model, huggingface_dataset, arxiv, docker_hub. Writing: dev_to, stackoverflow, youtube_video. Social: linkedin_post, instagram_post, instagram_profile. Ecommerce: shopify_product, shopify_collection, ecommerce_product (generic Schema.org), woocommerce_product, amazon_product, ebay_listing, etsy_listing. Reviews: trustpilot_reviews, substack_post. Each extractor claims a URL pattern via a public matches() fn and returns a typed JSON payload with the fields callers actually want (title, price, author, rating, review count, etc.) rather than a markdown blob.
• POST /v1/scrape/{vertical} on webclaw-server for explicit vertical routing. Picks the parser by name, validates the URL plausibly belongs to that vertical, returns the same shape as POST /v1/scrape but typed. 23 of 28 verticals also auto-dispatch from a plain POST /v1/scrape because their URL shapes are unique enough to claim safely; the remaining 5 (shopify_product, shopify_collection, ecommerce_product, woocommerce_product, substack_post) use patterns that non-target sites share, so callers opt in via the {vertical} route.
• GET /v1/extractors on webclaw-server. Returns the full catalog as {"extractors": [{"name": "...", "label": "...", "description": "...", "url_patterns": [...]}, ...]} so clients can build tooling / autocomplete / user-facing docs off a live source.
• Antibot cloud-escalation for 5 ecommerce + reviews verticals. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Trustpilot, and Substack (as HTML fallback) go through cloud::smart_fetch_html: try local fetch first; on bot-protection detection (Cloudflare challenge, DataDome, AWS WAF "Verifying your connection", etc.) escalate to api.webclaw.io/v1/scrape. Without WEBCLAW_API_KEY / WEBCLAW_CLOUD_API_KEY the extractor returns a typed CloudError::NotConfigured with an actionable signup link. With a key set, escalation is automatic. Every extractor stamps a data_source: "local" | "cloud" field on the response so callers can tell which path ran.
• cloud::synthesize_html for cloud-bypassed extraction. api.webclaw.io/v1/scrape deliberately does not return raw HTML; it returns a parsed bundle (structured_data JSON-LD blocks + metadata OG/meta tags + markdown). The new helper reassembles that bundle back into a minimal synthetic HTML doc (JSON-LD as <script> tags, metadata as OG <meta> tags, markdown in a <pre>) so existing local parsers run unchanged across both paths. No per-extractor code path branches are needed for "came from cloud" vs "came from local".
• Trustpilot 2025 schema parser. Trustpilot replaced their single-Organization + aggregateRating shape with three separate JSON-LD blocks: a site-level Organization (Trustpilot itself), a Dataset with a csvw:Table mainEntity carrying the per-star distribution for the target business, and an aiSummary + aiSummaryReviews block with the AI-generated summary and recent reviews. The parser walks all three, skips the site-level Org, picks the Dataset by about.@id matching the target domain, parses each csvw:column for rating buckets, computes weighted-average rating + total from the distribution, extracts the aiSummary text, and returns recent reviews with author / country / date / rating / title / text / likes.
• OG-tag fallback in ecommerce_product for sites with no JSON-LD and sites with JSON-LD but empty offers. Three paths now: jsonld (Schema.org Product with offers), jsonld+og (Product JSON-LD plus OG product tags filling in missing price), and og_fallback (no JSON-LD at all, build minimal payload from og:title, og:image, og:description, product:price:amount, product:price:currency, product:availability, product:brand). has_og_product_signal() gates the fallback on og:type=product or a price tag so blog posts don't get mis-classified as products.
• URL-slug title fallback in etsy_listing for delisted / blocked pages. When Etsy serves a placeholder page ("etsy.com", "Etsy - Your place to buy...", "This item is unavailable"), humanise the URL slug (/listing/123/personalized-stainless-steel-tumbler becomes "Personalized Stainless Steel Tumbler") so callers always get a meaningful title. Plus shop falls through offers[].seller.name then top-level brand because Etsy uses both schemas depending on listing age.
• Force-cloud-escalation in amazon_product when local HTML lacks Product JSON-LD. Amazon A/B-tests JSON-LD presence. When local fetch succeeds but has no Product block and a cloud client is configured, the extractor force-escalates to the cloud which reliably surfaces title + description via its render engine. Added OG meta-tag fallback so the cloud's synthesized HTML output (OG tags only, no Amazon DOM IDs) still yields title / image / description.
• AWS WAF "Verifying your connection" detector in cloud::is_bot_protected. Trustpilot serves a ~565 byte interstitial with an interstitial-spinner CSS class. The detector now fires on that pattern with a < 10_000 byte size gate to avoid false positives on real articles that happen to mention the phrase.

Changed

• webclaw-fetch::FetchClient gained an optional cloud field via with_cloud(CloudClient). Extractors reach it through client.cloud() to decide whether to escalate. webclaw-server::AppState reads WEBCLAW_CLOUD_API_KEY (preferred) or falls back to WEBCLAW_API_KEY only when inbound auth is not configured (open mode).
• Consolidated CloudClient into webclaw-fetch. Previously duplicated between webclaw-mcp/src/cloud.rs (302 LOC) and webclaw-cli/src/cloud.rs (80 LOC). Single canonical home with typed CloudError (NotConfigured, Unauthorized, InsufficientPlan, RateLimited, ServerError, Network, ParseFailed) that Display with actionable URLs; From<CloudError> for String bridge keeps pre-existing CLI / MCP call sites compiling unchanged during migration.

Tests

• 215 unit tests passing in webclaw-fetch (100+ new, covering every extractor's matcher, URL parser, JSON-LD / OG fallback paths, and the cloud synthesis helper). cargo clippy --workspace --release --no-deps clean.

---

[0.4.0] — 2026-04-22

Added

• webclaw bench <url> — per-URL extraction micro-benchmark (#26). New subcommand. Fetches a URL once, runs the same extraction pipeline as --format llm, and prints a small ASCII table comparing raw-HTML tokens vs. llm-output tokens, bytes, and extraction time. Pass --json for a single-line JSON object (stable shape, easy to append to ndjson in CI). Pass --facts <path> with a file in the same schema as benchmarks/facts.json to get a fidelity column ("4/5 facts preserved"); URLs absent from the facts file produce no fidelity row, so uncurated sites aren't shown as 0/0. v1 uses an approximate tokenizer (chars/4 for Latin text, chars/2 when CJK dominates) — off by ±10% vs. a real BPE tokenizer, but the signal ("the LLM pipeline dropped 93% of the raw bytes") is the point. Output clearly labels counts as ≈ tokens so nobody confuses them with a real tiktoken run. Swapping in tiktoken-rs later is a one-function change in bench.rs. Adding this as a clap subcommand rather than a flag also lays the groundwork for future subcommands without breaking the existing flag-based flow — webclaw <url> --format llm still works exactly as before.

• webclaw-server — new OSS binary for self-hosting a REST API (#29). Until now, docs/self-hosting promised a webclaw-server binary that only existed in the hosted-platform repo (closed source). The Docker image shipped two binaries while the docs advertised three, which sent self-hosters into a bug loop. This release closes the gap: a new crate at crates/webclaw-server/ builds a minimal, stateless axum server that exposes the OSS extraction pipeline over HTTP with the same JSON shapes as api.webclaw.io. Endpoints: GET /health, POST /v1/{scrape,crawl,map,batch,extract,summarize,diff,brand}. Run with webclaw-server --port 3000 [--host 0.0.0.0] [--api-key <bearer>] or the matching WEBCLAW_PORT / WEBCLAW_HOST / WEBCLAW_API_KEY env vars. Bearer auth is constant-time (via subtle::ConstantTimeEq); open mode (no key) is allowed on 127.0.0.1 for local development.

  What self-hosting gives you: the full extraction pipeline, Crawler, sitemap discovery, brand/diff, LLM extract/summarize (via Ollama or your own OpenAI/Anthropic key). What it does not give you: anti-bot bypass (Cloudflare, DataDome, WAFs), headless JS rendering, async job queues, multi-tenant auth/billing, domain-hints and proxy routing — those require the hosted backend at api.webclaw.io and are intentionally not open-source. The self-hosting docs have been updated to reflect this split honestly.

• crawl endpoint runs synchronously and hard-caps at 500 pages / 20 concurrency. No job queue, no background workers — a naive caller can't OOM the process. batch caps at 100 URLs / 20 concurrency for the same reason. For unbounded crawls use the hosted API.

Changed

• Docker image now ships three binaries, not two. Dockerfile and Dockerfile.ci both add webclaw-server to /usr/local/bin/ and EXPOSE 3000 for documentation. The entrypoint shim is unchanged: docker run IMAGE webclaw-server --port 3000 Just Works, and the CLI/URL pass-through from v0.3.19 is preserved.

Docs

• Rewrote docs/self-hosting on the landing site to differentiate OSS (self-hosted REST) from the hosted platform. Added a capability matrix so new users don't have to read the repo to figure out why Cloudflare-protected sites still 403 when pointing at their own box.

Fixed

• Dead-code warning on cargo install webclaw-mcp (#30). rmcp 1.3.x changed how the #[tool_handler] macro reads the tool_router struct field — it now goes through a derived trait impl instead of referencing the field by name, so rustc's dead-code lint no longer sees it. The field is still essential (dropping it unregisters every MCP tool), just invisible to the lint. Annotated with #[allow(dead_code)] and a comment explaining why. No behaviour change. Warning disappears on the next cargo install.

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[0.3.19] — 2026-04-17

Fixed

• Docker image can be used as a FROM base again. v0.3.13 switched the Docker CMD to ENTRYPOINT ["webclaw"] so that docker run IMAGE https://example.com would pass the URL through as expected. That change trapped a different use case: downstream Dockerfiles that FROM ghcr.io/0xmassi/webclaw and set their own CMD ["./setup.sh"] — the child's ./setup.sh became the first arg to webclaw, which tried to fetch it as a URL and failed with error sending request for uri (https://./setup.sh). Both Dockerfile and Dockerfile.ci now use a small docker-entrypoint.sh shim that forwards flags (-*) and URLs (http://, https://) to webclaw, but execs anything else directly. All four use cases now work: docker run IMAGE https://example.com, docker run IMAGE --help, child-image CMD ["./setup.sh"], and docker run IMAGE bash for debugging. Default CMD is ["webclaw", "--help"].

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[0.3.18] — 2026-04-16

Fixed

• UTF-8 char boundary panic in webclaw-core::extractor::find_content_position (#16). After rejecting a match that fell inside image syntax (![...](...)), the scan advanced search_from by a single byte. If the rejected match started on a multi-byte character (Cyrillic, CJK, accented Latin, emoji), the next markdown[search_from..] slice landed mid-char and panicked with byte index N is not a char boundary; it is inside 'X'. Repro was webclaw https://bruler.ru/about_brand -f json. Now advances by needle.len() — always a valid char boundary, and faster because it skips the whole rejected match instead of re-scanning inside it. Two regression tests cover multi-byte rejected matches and all-rejected cycles in Cyrillic text.

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[0.3.17] — 2026-04-16

Changed

• webclaw-fetch::sitemap::parse_robots_txt now does proper directive parsing. The previous trimmed[..8].eq_ignore_ascii_case("sitemap:") slice couldn't handle "Sitemap :" (space before colon) from bad generators, didn't strip inline # ... comments, and would have returned empty/garbage values if a directive line had no URL. Now splits on the first colon, matches any-case sitemap as the directive name, strips comments, and requires the value to contain :// before accepting it. Eight new unit tests cover case variants, space-before-colon, inline comments, non-URL values, and non-sitemap directives.
• webclaw-fetch::crawler::is_cancelled uses Ordering::Acquire (was Relaxed). Technically equivalent on x86/arm64 for single-word loads, but the explicit ordering documents the synchronization intent for readers and the compiler.

Added

• webclaw-mcp caches the Firefox FetchClient lazily. Tool calls that repeatedly request the Firefox profile without cookies used to build a fresh reqwest pool + TLS stack per call; a single OnceLock keeps the client alive for the life of the server. Chrome (default) and Random (by design per-call) are unaffected.

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[0.3.16] — 2026-04-16

Hardened

• Response body caps across fetch + LLM providers (P2). Every HTTP response buffered from the network is now rejected if it exceeds a hard size cap. webclaw-fetch::Response::from_wreq caps HTML/doc responses at 50 MB (before the allocation pays for anything and as a belt-and-braces check after bytes().await); webclaw-llm providers (anthropic / openai / ollama) cap JSON responses at 5 MB via a shared response_json_capped helper. Previously an adversarial or runaway upstream could push unbounded memory into the process. Closes the DoS-via-giant-body class of bugs noted in the audit.
• Crawler frontier cap (P2). After each depth level the frontier is truncated to max(max_pages × 10, 100) entries, keeping the most recently discovered links. Dense pages (tag clouds, search results) used to push the frontier into the tens of thousands even after max_pages halted new fetches, keeping string allocations alive long after the crawl was effectively done.
• Glob pattern validation (P2). User-supplied include_patterns / exclude_patterns passed to the crawler are now rejected if they contain more than 4 ** wildcards or exceed 1024 chars. The backtracking matcher degrades exponentially on deeply-nested ** against long paths; this keeps adversarial config files from weaponising it.

Cleanup

• Removed blanket #![allow(dead_code)] in webclaw-cli/src/main.rs. No dead code surfaced; the suppression was obsolete.
• .gitignore: replaced overbroad *.json with specific local-artifact patterns. The previous rule would have swallowed package.json / components.json / .smithery/*.json if they were ever modified.

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[0.3.15] — 2026-04-16

Fixed

• Batch/crawl no longer panics on semaphore close (P1). Three permit.acquire().await.expect("semaphore closed") call sites in webclaw-fetch (client::fetch_batch, client::fetch_and_extract_batch_with_options, crawler inner loop) now surface a typed FetchError::Build("semaphore closed before acquire") or a failed PageResult instead of panicking the spawned task. Under normal operation nothing changes; under shutdown-race or adversarial runtime state, the caller sees one failed entry in the batch instead of losing the task silently to the runtime's panic handler. Surfaced by the 2026-04-16 workspace audit.

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[0.3.14] — 2026-04-16

Security

• --on-change command injection closed (P0). The --on-change flag on webclaw watch and its multi-URL variant used to pipe the whole user-supplied string through sh -c. Anyone (or any LLM driving the MCP surface, or any config file parsed on the user's behalf) that could influence the flag value could execute arbitrary shell. The command is now tokenized with shlex and executed directly via Command::new(prog).args(args), so metacharacters like ;, &&, |, $(), <(...), and env expansion no longer fire. A WEBCLAW_ALLOW_SHELL=1 escape hatch is available for users who genuinely need pipelines; it logs a warning on every invocation so it can't slip in silently. Surfaced by the 2026-04-16 workspace audit.

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[0.3.13] — 2026-04-10

Fixed

• Docker CMD replaced with ENTRYPOINT: both Dockerfile and Dockerfile.ci now use ENTRYPOINT ["webclaw"] instead of CMD ["webclaw"]. CLI arguments (e.g. docker run webclaw https://example.com) now pass through correctly instead of being ignored.

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[0.3.12] — 2026-04-10

Added

• Crawl scope control: new allow_subdomains and allow_external_links fields on CrawlConfig. By default crawls stay same-origin. Enable allow_subdomains to follow sibling/child subdomains (e.g. blog.example.com from example.com), or allow_external_links for full cross-origin crawling. Root domain extraction uses a heuristic that handles two-part TLDs (co.uk, com.au).

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[0.3.11] — 2026-04-10

Added

• Sitemap fallback paths: discovery now tries /sitemap_index.xml, /wp-sitemap.xml, and /sitemap/sitemap-index.xml in addition to the standard /sitemap.xml. Sites using WordPress or non-standard sitemap locations are now discovered without needing external search.

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[0.3.10] — 2026-04-10

Changed

• Fetch timeout reduced from 30s to 12s: prevents cascading slowdowns when proxies are unresponsive. Worst-case per-URL drops from ~94s to ~25s.
• Retry attempts reduced from 3 to 2: combined with shorter timeout, total worst-case is 12s + 1s delay + 12s = 25s instead of 30s + 1s + 30s + 3s + 30s = 94s.

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[0.3.9] — 2026-04-04

Fixed

• Layout tables rendered as sections: tables used for page layout (containing block elements like <p>, <div>, <hr>) are now rendered as standalone sections instead of pipe-delimited markdown tables. Fixes Drudge Report and similar sites where all content was flattened into a single unreadable line. (by @devnen in #14)
• Stack overflow on deeply nested HTML: pages with 200+ DOM nesting levels (e.g., Express.co.uk live blogs) no longer overflow the stack. Two-layer fix: depth guard in markdown.rs falls back to iterator-based text collection at depth 200, and extract_with_options() spawns an 8 MB worker thread for safety on Windows. (by @devnen in #14)
• Noise filter swallowing content in malformed HTML: <form> tags no longer unconditionally treated as noise — ASP.NET page-wrapping forms (>500 chars) are preserved. Safety valve prevents unclosed noise containers (header/footer with >5000 chars) from absorbing entire page content. (by @devnen in #14)

Changed

• Bold/italic block passthrough: <b>/<strong>/<em>/<i> tags containing block-level children (e.g., Drudge wrapping columns in <b>) now act as transparent containers instead of collapsing everything into inline bold/italic. (by @devnen in #14)

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[0.3.8] — 2026-04-03

Fixed

• MCP research token overflow: research results are now saved to ~/.webclaw/research/ and the MCP tool returns file paths + findings instead of the full report. Prevents "exceeds maximum allowed tokens" errors in Claude/Cursor.
• Research caching: same query returns cached result instantly without spending credits.
• Anthropic rate limit throttling: 60s delay between LLM calls in research to stay under Tier 1 limits (50K input tokens/min).

Added

• dirs dependency for ~/.webclaw/research/ path resolution.

---

[0.3.7] — 2026-04-03

Added

• --research CLI flag: run deep research via the cloud API. Prints report to stdout and saves full result (report + sources + findings) to a JSON file. Supports --deep for longer reports.
• MCP extract/summarize cloud fallback: when no local LLM is available, these tools now fall back to the cloud API instead of erroring. Set WEBCLAW_API_KEY for automatic fallback.
• MCP research structured output: the research tool now returns structured JSON (report + sources + findings + metadata) instead of raw text, so agents can reference individual findings and source URLs.

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[0.3.6] — 2026-04-02

Added

• Structured data in markdown/LLM output: __NEXT_DATA__, SvelteKit, and JSON-LD data now appears as a ## Structured Data section with a JSON code block at the end of -f markdown and -f llm output. Works with --only-main-content and all other flags.

Fixed

• Homebrew CI: formula now updates all 4 platform checksums after Docker build completes, preventing SHA mismatch on Linux installs (#12).

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[0.3.5] — 2026-04-02

Added

• __NEXT_DATA__ extraction: Next.js pages now have their pageProps JSON extracted into structured_data. Contains prices, product info, page state, and other data that isn't in the visible HTML. Tested on 45 sites — 13 now return rich structured data (BBC, Forbes, Nike, Stripe, TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, NASA, etc.).

---

[0.3.4] — 2026-04-01

Added

• SvelteKit data island extraction: extracts structured JSON from kit.start() data arrays. Handles unquoted JS object keys by converting to valid JSON before parsing. Data appears in the structured_data field.

Changed

• License changed from MIT to AGPL-3.0.

---

[0.3.3] — 2026-04-01

Changed

• Replaced custom TLS stack with wreq: migrated from webclaw-tls (patched rustls/h2/hyper/reqwest) to wreq by @0x676e67. wreq uses BoringSSL for TLS and the http2 crate for HTTP/2 fingerprinting — both battle-tested with 60+ browser profiles.
• Removed all [patch.crates-io] entries: consumers no longer need to patch rustls, h2, hyper, hyper-util, or reqwest. Just depend on webclaw normally.
• Browser profiles rebuilt on wreq's Emulation API: Chrome 145, Firefox 135, Safari 18, Edge 145 with correct TLS options (cipher suites, curves, GREASE, ECH, PSK session resumption), HTTP/2 SETTINGS ordering, pseudo-header order, and header wire order.
• Better TLS compatibility: BoringSSL handles more server configurations than patched rustls (e.g. servers that previously returned IllegalParameter alerts).

Removed

• webclaw-tls dependency and all 5 forked crates (webclaw-rustls, webclaw-h2, webclaw-hyper, webclaw-hyper-util, webclaw-reqwest).

Acknowledgments

• TLS and HTTP/2 fingerprinting powered by wreq and http2 by @0x676e67, who pioneered browser-grade HTTP/2 fingerprinting in Rust.

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[0.3.2] — 2026-03-31

Added

• --cookie-file flag: load cookies from JSON files exported by browser extensions (EditThisCookie, Cookie-Editor). Format: [{name, value, domain, ...}].
• MCP cookies parameter: the scrape tool now accepts a cookies array for authenticated scraping.
• Combined cookies: --cookie and --cookie-file can be used together and merge automatically.

---

[0.3.1] — 2026-03-30

Added

• Cookie warmup fallback: when a fetch returns an Akamai challenge page, automatically visits the homepage first to collect _abck/bm_sz cookies, then retries the original URL. Enables extraction of Akamai-protected subpages (e.g. fansale ticket pages) without JS rendering.

Changed

• Fixed HTTP header wire order (accept/user-agent were in wrong positions) and added H2 PRIORITY flag in HEADERS frames.
• FetchResult.headers now uses http::HeaderMap instead of HashMap<String, String> — avoids per-response allocation, preserves multi-value headers.

[0.3.0] — 2026-03-29

Changed

• Replaced primp with webclaw-tls: switched to custom TLS fingerprinting stack.
• Browser profiles: Chrome 146 (Win/Mac), Firefox 135+, Safari 18, Edge 146 — captured from real browsers.
• HTTP/2 fingerprinting: SETTINGS frame ordering and pseudo-header ordering based on concepts pioneered by @0x676e67.

Fixed

• HTTPS completely broken (#5): primp's forked rustls rejected valid certificates (UnknownIssuer on cross-signed chains like example.com). Fixed by using native OS root CAs alongside Mozilla bundle.
• Unknown certificate extensions: servers returning SCT in certificate entries no longer cause TLS errors.

Added

• Native root CA support: uses OS trust store (macOS Keychain, Windows cert store) in addition to webpki-roots.
• HTTP/2 fingerprinting: SETTINGS frame ordering and pseudo-header ordering match real browsers.
• Per-browser header ordering: HTTP headers sent in browser-specific wire order.
• Bandwidth tracking: atomic byte counters shared across cloned clients.

---

[0.2.2] — 2026-03-27

Fixed

• cargo install broken with primp 1.2.0: added missing reqwest patch to [patch.crates-io]. primp moved to reqwest 0.13 which requires a patched fork.
• Weekly dependency check: CI now runs every Monday to catch primp patch drift before users hit it.

---

[0.2.1] — 2026-03-27

Added

• Docker image on GHCR: docker run ghcr.io/0xmassi/webclaw — auto-built on every release
• QuickJS data island extraction: inline <script> execution catches window.__PRELOADED_STATE__, Next.js hydration data, and other JS-embedded content

Fixed

• Docker CI now runs as part of the release workflow (was missing, image was never published)

---

[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

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[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