nab

Token-optimized web fetcher + multilingual ASR + URL watcher. MCP 2025-11-25 compliant. Rust. macOS arm64 first, cross-platform.

nab is a single Rust binary that does three things very well: it fetches any URL as clean markdown (with your real browser cookies and anti-bot evasion), it analyzes any audio or video file with on-device multilingual ASR and speaker diarization, and it watches any URL for changes and pushes notifications when content moves. Everything runs locally. There are no API keys to set up by default. The output is shaped for LLM context windows.

Why nab

• Token-lean by design. nab returns only what an LLM actually needs — clean markdown, BM25-lite query-focused extraction, and structure-aware token budgets — cutting the token cost of web research instead of dumping raw HTML into your context window.
• Multimodal, fully on-device. Transcribe and diarize any audio or video (FluidAudio / Parakeet TDT v3 on the Apple Neural Engine — 131× realtime on a 2-hour clip, 25 EU languages, word-level timestamps, optional Qwen3-ASR for zh/ja/ko/vi) and OCR images via Apple Vision (15 languages, ~10–50 ms). No cloud, no API keys.
• Authenticated reach. Real browser cookies, 1Password auto-login with TOTP/MFA, WebAuthn passkeys, fingerprint spoofing and WAF evasion — reach internal dashboards, SaaS apps, and paywalled research with the same command as a public URL.
• Watch the web. Subscribe to any URL via MCP resources — conditional GETs, semantic diff, adaptive backoff. RSS for the entire web.
• Prompt-injection defense, on by default. Hidden instructions addressed to your AI are surfaced to you, not silently executed by your model — see Security.

Everything is a single local Rust binary. No cloud backend, no API keys by default, output shaped for LLM context windows.

Quick start

Tell your AI assistant (recommended):

Read https://github.com/MikkoParkkola/nab and install nab as my web fetching and audio analysis MCP server

Your agent will install the binary, wire itself up, and start fetching. Works in Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and any AI with terminal access.

Or install and try manually:

brew trust --tap MikkoParkkola/tap   # Homebrew 6.0+
brew install MikkoParkkola/tap/nab                            # install
nab fetch https://news.ycombinator.com                        # fetch as markdown
nab models fetch fluidaudio                                   # download ASR model
nab analyze interview.mp4 --diarize                           # transcribe + identify speakers
nab watch add https://status.openai.com --interval 5m         # subscribe to changes

Features

Security: prompt-injection defense

Web pages increasingly carry instructions written for the AI, not for you — concealed in HTML comments, display:none / aria-hidden text, data-ai / data-mcp / data-agent attribute payloads, or WebMCP manifests. Fetch such a page with a naive tool and those hidden instructions land straight in your model's context, where they can be acted on. This is the prompt-injection-as-phishing class of attack.

nab treats every fetched page as hostile input and runs two local, non-networked guards before any content reaches your agent — on by default, no flag, no setup:

• Secure Ingestion guard — detects and strips machine-targeted markup that is invisible to humans (AI-addressed comments, hidden display:none / aria-hidden text, agent-only data-* payloads, WebMCP advertisements) and reports each detection at Info / Warn / Block severity, so you see what a page tried to tell your agent instead of it being silently executed.
• YARA-X signature guard — scans every returned body for prompt-injection, exfiltration, secret-leak, and obfuscation signatures, redacting matched sections by default. Set NAB_YARA_ACTION=refuse to block the fetch outright (or NAB_YARA_BYPASS=1 as an audited emergency opt-out).

The net effect: hidden instructions become visible to you, not executed by your model — a strong reason to point your agent at nab fetch instead of a built-in web-fetch tool.

Licensing: both guards are Enterprise Edition modules — free for personal and non-commercial use under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; commercial / business use requires a commercial license (see COMMERCIAL.md and the License section).

Installation

Homebrew (macOS, recommended)

brew tap MikkoParkkola/tap
brew install nab

Pre-built binary (no Rust toolchain required)

Most users want this path — these are ready-to-run binaries; nothing is compiled on your machine.

If you have cargo-binstall, it fetches the right pre-built binary automatically:

cargo binstall nab

Otherwise download directly from GitHub Releases. Both the nab CLI and the nab-mcp server ship for every platform below, alongside checksums-sha256.txt:

Example install for macOS Apple Silicon (substitute the filename for your platform):

shasum -a 256 -c checksums-sha256.txt --ignore-missing
chmod +x nab-aarch64-apple-darwin
mv nab-aarch64-apple-darwin /usr/local/bin/nab
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /usr/local/bin/nab 2>/dev/null || true

From crates.io (compiles from source)

Builds nab locally — requires the Rust toolchain (1.95 or newer) and takes a few minutes:

cargo install nab

From source

git clone https://github.com/MikkoParkkola/nab.git
cd nab
cargo install --path .

Avoiding duplicate installs

If you install nab through more than one channel (for example a Homebrew tap and cargo install), the copy that wins depends on PATH order. On many setups /opt/homebrew/bin comes before ~/.cargo/bin, so a Homebrew binary can shadow a newer cargo-installed one — and nab --version then reports the older version.

Run the built-in diagnostic to see every nab on your PATH, which one wins, and their versions:

nab doctor

If the binary on your PATH is the stale one, its doctor may predate this command; invoke the newer install by full path to diagnose, e.g. ~/.cargo/bin/nab doctor. To resolve, keep a single install channel (brew uninstall nab or cargo uninstall nab), or reorder PATH so the directory of the install you want comes first.

MCP Configuration

Add to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nab": {
      "command": "nab-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Or use the auto-installer:

nab mcp install                        # Claude Desktop (default)
nab mcp install --client claude-code   # Claude Code
nab mcp install --client cursor        # Cursor
nab mcp install --client windsurf      # Windsurf
nab mcp install --client codex         # OpenAI Codex CLI
nab mcp install --client vscode        # VS Code Copilot
nab mcp install --client zed           # Zed
nab mcp install --dry-run              # preview without writing

Also supported: gemini, amazon-q, lm-studio.

See MCP integration below for the full list of tools, capabilities, and HTTP transport.

Claude Code plugin

This repository includes a local Claude Code plugin in plugin/. It bundles nab MCP auto-registration with the Claude Elite research, url-insight, wayback, ia, and oreilly skills.

claude --plugin-dir ./plugin

The plugin exposes the /nab workflow shape for fetch, authenticated Brave-cookie fetches, archive retrieval, and multi-source research. It keeps nab's auth-aware path front and center: nab fetch --cookies brave <url> for existing browser sessions and nab fetch --1password <url> for 1Password/TOTP flows.

Usage

Fetch

# Basic fetch — auto-detects browser, returns markdown
nab fetch https://example.com

# Use cookies from a specific browser
nab fetch https://github.com/notifications --cookies brave

# 1Password auto-login (TOTP/MFA supported)
nab fetch https://internal.company.com --1password

# Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Slides) with comments
nab fetch --cookies brave "https://docs.google.com/document/d/DOCID/edit"

# Output JSON with confidence scores
nab fetch https://example.com --format json

# Batch fetch with parallelism
nab fetch --batch urls.txt --parallel 8

# Explicit browser rendering for JS-heavy pages
NAB_BROWSER_CDP_WS=wss://... nab browser https://example.com
nab fetch https://example.com --render --browser-cdp-url wss://...

Common flags for fetch:

MCP fetch additionally supports focus, readability, max_tokens, and session parameters for query-focused extraction, readability extraction, structure-aware token budgets, and persistent encrypted cookie sessions.

Analyze

nab analyze transcribes audio and video files locally. The default backend on macOS arm64 is FluidAudio, which runs Parakeet TDT v3 on the Apple Neural Engine.

# Download the ASR model (~600 MB, one-time)
nab models fetch fluidaudio

# Transcribe a video
nab analyze interview.mp4

# Add speaker diarization (PyAnnote community-1)
nab analyze interview.mp4 --diarize

# Force a language hint (BCP-47)
nab analyze podcast.mp3 --language fi

# Word-level timestamps
nab analyze talk.mp4 --word-timestamps

# Active reading: nab uses MCP sampling to look up references mentioned in the audio
nab analyze interview.mp4 --active-reading

# Expose speaker embeddings for matching against hebb's voiceprint database
nab analyze interview.mp4 --diarize --include-embeddings

# Output JSON
nab analyze podcast.mp3 --format json

Real numbers from a 2 h 09 m English audio file (Karen Hao interview, MacBook Pro M-series):

Watch

nab watch turns any URL into a subscribable resource. MCP clients receive notifications/resources/updated when the content changes.

nab watch add https://news.ycombinator.com --interval 10m
nab watch add https://example.com/pricing --interval 1h --selector "table.pricing"
nab watch add https://api.openai.com/status --interval 5m --notify-on regression
nab watch list
nab watch logs <id>
nab watch remove <id>

Per-watch options:

The poller uses conditional GETs (If-None-Match, If-Modified-Since), so 304 responses cost effectively nothing. Watches with five consecutive failures auto-mute. Adaptive backoff applies on 429 and 503.

Models

nab models list                           # show installed model versions
nab models fetch fluidaudio               # download FluidAudio binary + Parakeet weights
nab models update fluidaudio              # check for upstream updates
nab models verify fluidaudio              # checksum + smoke test

Both whisper and sherpa-onnx ship as cross-platform fallbacks alongside the macOS-default fluidaudio backend.

MCP integration

nab-mcp is a native Rust MCP server. It runs over stdio (default) or Streamable HTTP. It is fully compliant with MCP protocol version 2025-11-25.

Quick setup (recommended)

nab mcp install                        # Claude Desktop (default)
nab mcp install --client claude-code   # Claude Code
nab mcp install --client cursor        # Cursor
nab mcp install --client windsurf      # Windsurf
nab mcp install --client codex         # OpenAI Codex CLI
nab mcp install --client vscode        # VS Code Copilot
nab mcp install --client zed           # Zed
nab mcp install --dry-run              # preview what would change

Also supported: gemini, amazon-q, lm-studio. This auto-detects the nab-mcp binary path, backs up your existing config, and adds the nab entry. Restart your client after installing.

Manual setup

Add to your MCP client configuration (~/.config/claude/mcp.json or equivalent):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nab": {
      "command": "nab-mcp"
    }
  }
}

HTTP transport

nab mcp serve --http 127.0.0.1:8765
# or directly:
nab-mcp --http 127.0.0.1:8765

Bind to localhost by default. Origin checks and MCP-Protocol-Version header validation are enforced per spec.

MCP capabilities

The 12 MCP tools:

Site providers

nab detects URLs for 12 platforms and uses APIs or stable structured page data instead of broad HTML scraping.

If no provider matches, nab falls back to standard HTML fetch + markdown conversion.

Architecture

nab is built around a small set of orthogonal subsystems: cmd/ (CLI), bin/mcp_server/ (MCP server), content/ (HTML / PDF / OCR pipeline), analyze/ (ASR + diarization + vision), watch/ (URL monitoring + subscriptions), auth/ (cookies + 1Password + WebAuthn), site/ (per-site providers), and the shared AcceleratedClient (HTTP/3 + connection pool + fingerprint store).

See:

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — full module map and data flow
• docs/sovereign-stack.md — how nab composes with hebb to form a local-first multimodal stack
• docs/getting-started.md — new user onboarding

Design notes

The docs/design/ directory tracks recent design proposals:

• analyze-v2.md — multilingual ASR + diarization + vision pipeline
• url-watch-resources.md — URL watch as MCP subscribable resources
• active-reading.md — active reading via MCP sampling
• mcp-spec-closure.md — closing the last MCP 2025-11-25 spec gaps

Companion tools

nab is half of a sovereign multimodal stack. The other half is hebb, a neuroscience-inspired memory MCP server. Composition examples:

• nab analyze --diarize --include-embeddings → hebb voice_match → speakers labeled with names
• nab fetch URL → hebb kv_set → personal sovereign web memory
• nab watch add URL → hebb kv_set (on update) → time-series of changes to any web page

See docs/sovereign-stack.md for the full composition story.

Configuration

nab requires no configuration files. It uses smart defaults: auto-detected browser cookies, randomized fingerprints, and markdown output.

Persistent state lives in ~/.nab/:

Optional plugin configuration at ~/.config/nab/plugins.toml. See docs/getting-started.md for plugin examples.

Environment variables

Library usage

use nab::AcceleratedClient;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    let client = AcceleratedClient::new()?;
    let html = client.fetch_text("https://example.com").await?;
    println!("Fetched {} bytes", html.len());
    Ok(())
}

Requirements

• Rust 1.95+ for building from source
• ffmpeg for analyze and stream commands: brew install ffmpeg
• 1Password CLI (optional, for credential integration): see 1Password docs

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup, code style guidelines, testing instructions, and pull request process.

Responsible use

This tool includes browser cookie extraction and fingerprint spoofing capabilities. They are intended for legitimate use cases — accessing your own authenticated content, automated testing, sites where you have authorization. Use responsibly.

Troubleshooting

MCP server not connecting? Run nab-mcp directly in your terminal to see errors. Verify the binary exists with which nab-mcp. If installed via cargo install nab, both nab and nab-mcp should be on your $PATH.

Cookie extraction failing? Grant Full Disk Access to your terminal in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access (macOS). Browser cookies are stored in protected directories. Use --cookies brave to target a specific browser. Background tools that must never show a Keychain authorization dialog can run NAB_KEYCHAIN_INTERACTION=never nab .... Plaintext cookies and credentials that macOS can provide silently still work; credentials that require approval are unavailable, and Nab fails closed instead of invoking a prompt-capable fallback.

ASR model not found? Run nab models fetch fluidaudio to download the model (~542 MB). The model directory is ~/.nab/models/. Use nab models list to see what's installed.

Fetch returning HTML instead of markdown? Some sites block automated access. Try nab fetch URL --cookies brave to use your browser session, or nab fetch URL --1password for sites that need login.

Fetch returning thin content from a JavaScript app? Default nab fetch stays local-first and HTTP-only. For pages that need DOM execution, configure an external CDP endpoint with NAB_BROWSER_CDP_WS or --browser-cdp-url, then run nab browser URL or nab fetch URL --render. Remote browser providers may receive the URL and rendered page content; local browser cookies are not automatically available to remote browsers.

YARA-X guard redacted a fetch? nab fetch and MCP fetch scan returned bodies by default before saving or returning content. NAB_YARA_ACTION=refuse blocks instead of redacting. NAB_YARA_BYPASS=1 is an audited emergency opt-out.

"too many open files" on watch? Increase your ulimit: ulimit -n 4096. The default macOS limit (256) is too low for many concurrent watches.

Ecosystem

nab is part of a suite of MCP tools:

License

nab is dual-licensed as of v0.9.0:

EE-designated paths (every file carries // SPDX-License-Identifier: PolyForm-Noncommercial-1.0.0):

• src/auth/ — 1Password, WebAuthn, and browser-cookie injection (premium authenticated reach)
• src/fingerprint/ — browser fingerprint spoofing (anti-bot evasion)
• src/waf/ — WAF challenge handling
• src/site/ — per-site provider integrations (proprietary domain knowledge)
• src/security/ — Secure Ingestion guard for stripping machine-targeted HTML directives and hidden metadata
• crates/nab-yara-engine/ — fetch-time YARA-X signature guard for prompt injection, exfiltration, secrets, and obfuscation

What this means in practice:

• Free for noncommercial use, modification, redistribution.
• Commercial use of EE modules requires a separate commercial license.
• Companies can buy a standard commercial-use license via GitHub Sponsors at EUR 500/month per named project.
• See COMMERCIAL.md for business use, forks, wrappers, shared services, and managed-service deployments.
• All releases prior to v0.9.0 remain entirely MIT and stay MIT forever.