Kreuzcrawl README
The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Kreuzcrawl listing page.
Crawlberg
Turn any website into clean, structured data. Point Crawlberg at a URL and get back Markdown, metadata, and links — from a single page or a whole site — in the language you already use.
What and Why?
You need data that lives on the web, and raw HTML is not it. Crawlberg does the crawling, scraping, and cleanup end-to-end: it fetches pages, follows links, converts each one to Markdown, and hands you structured metadata (titles, links, images, social-card and JSON-LD data) — so you skip the parsing and go straight to the content.
It runs from a single Rust core with identical results across 14 language bindings, and it handles the awkward parts for you: JavaScript-heavy pages fall back to a real headless browser, bot filters are detected and worked around, robots and sitemaps are respected, requests are throttled per domain, and requests to private or internal addresses are refused by default. Drive it from your code, an AI agent, a REST service, or the CLI.
Every part of the pipeline is a trait you can swap — the crawl frontier, rate limiter, storage, event stream, and content filters — so you can plug in your own behavior. Managed extras like proxy pools, tuned bot-evasion, authenticated sessions, scheduling, and billing live in xberg-enterprise.
Features
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Structured extraction | Text, metadata, links, images, assets, JSON-LD, Open Graph, hreflang, favicons, headings, response headers |
| Markdown conversion | Clean Markdown with citations, document structure, and fit-content mode |
| Concurrent crawling | Depth-first, breadth-first, or best-first traversal with configurable depth, page limits, and concurrency |
| 14 language bindings | Rust, Python, Node.js, Ruby, Go, Java, Kotlin (Android), C#, PHP, Elixir, Dart, Swift, Zig, and WebAssembly |
| Smart filtering | BM25 relevance scoring, URL include/exclude patterns, robots.txt compliance, sitemap discovery |
| Browser rendering | Optional headless browser for JavaScript-heavy SPAs with WAF detection and bypass |
| Batch & streaming | Scrape or crawl hundreds of URLs concurrently; real-time crawl events via async streams |
| SSRF-safe by default | Refuses loopback, private, link-local, and cloud-metadata addresses; opt out via env var or CrawlConfig |
| Auth & rate limiting | HTTP Basic, Bearer, and custom-header auth with cookie jars; per-domain request throttling |
| MCP server & REST API | Model Context Protocol integration for AI agents plus an HTTP server with OpenAPI spec |
Supported Platforms
Precompiled binaries for glibc Linux (x86_64/aarch64), macOS, and Windows across every binding. On musl Linux (Alpine) coverage is deliberately partial — the CLI, Docker image, Rust, Ruby, Java, C#, and Elixir work there; the Node, Python, Go, and PHP bindings do not ship musl artifacts. See the platform support matrix for the full table and the Alpine workarounds.
⭐ Star this repo to show your support — it helps others discover Crawlberg.
Quick Start
Language Packages
Python
See Python README for full documentation.
Node.js
See Node.js README for full documentation.
Rust
See Rust README for full documentation.
Go
See Go README for full documentation.
Java
Available on Maven Central as io.xberg.crawlberg:crawlberg. See Java README for the dependency snippet and current version.
C#
See C# README for full documentation.
Ruby
See Ruby README for full documentation.
PHP
See PHP README for full documentation.
Elixir
Add {:crawlberg, "~> 0.3"} to your mix.exs dependencies. See Elixir README for full documentation.
Dart / Flutter
See Dart README for full documentation.
Kotlin (Android)
Available on Maven Central as io.xberg.crawlberg.android:crawlberg-android. See Kotlin README for the dependency snippet and current version.
Swift
Add via Swift Package Manager. See Swift README for full documentation.
Zig
See Zig README for installation and usage.
WebAssembly
See WebAssembly README for full documentation.
C/C++ (FFI)
C header + shared library from GitHub Releases. See FFI crate for full documentation.
AI Coding Assistants
Install the Crawlberg plugin from xberg-io/crawlberg. It ships the Crawlberg agent skills (site crawling, HTML→Markdown scraping, headless-Chrome fallback) plus the crawlberg MCP server, and works with every major coding agent — expand your harness below.
Claude Code
Codex CLI
Then search for crawlberg and select Install Plugin.
Cursor
Settings → Plugins → Add from URL → https://github.com/xberg-io/crawlberg, then select crawlberg.
Gemini CLI
Factory Droid
GitHub Copilot CLI
opencode
Add the package to opencode.json:
Documentation
Full guides, per-language API references, the substrate/operational model, antibot strategy, and observability live at docs.crawlberg.xberg.io.
Contributing
Contributions are welcome! See our Contributing Guide.
Part of Xberg.io
- Xberg — the open-source content-intelligence engine: text, tables, and metadata from 101 formats (115 file extensions), with OCR, transcription, and code intelligence. MIT.
- Xberg Pro — a complete self-hosted content-intelligence backend in a single container. Commercial.
- Xberg Enterprise — the distributed, governed content-intelligence platform, scaled on Kubernetes with team governance and support. Commercial.
- crawlberg — web crawling and scraping with HTML→Markdown and headless-Chrome fallback.
- html-to-markdown — fast, lossless HTML→Markdown engine.
- liter-llm — universal LLM API client with native bindings for 14 languages and 165 providers.
- tree-sitter-language-pack — tree-sitter grammars and code-intelligence primitives.
- alef — the polyglot binding generator that produces every per-language binding across the 5 polyglot repos.
License
Links
- Documentation
- GitHub Repository
- Issue Tracker
- Changelog
- Discord — community, roadmap, announcements.