Release/v0.7.8 (#1662)

* Fix: Use correct URL variable for raw HTML extraction (#1116)

- Prevents full HTML content from being passed as URL to extraction strategies
- Added unit tests to verify raw HTML and regular URL processing

Fix: Wrong URL variable used for extraction of raw html

* Fix #1181: Preserve whitespace in code blocks during HTML scraping

  The remove_empty_elements_fast() method was removing whitespace-only
  span elements inside <pre> and <code> tags, causing import statements
  like "import torch" to become "importtorch". Now skips elements inside
  code blocks where whitespace is significant.

* Refactor Pydantic model configuration to use ConfigDict for arbitrary types

* Fix EmbeddingStrategy: Uncomment response handling for the variations and clean up mock data. ref #1621

* Fix: permission issues with .cache/url_seeder and other runtime cache dirs. ref #1638

* fix: ensure BrowserConfig.to_dict serializes proxy_config

* feat: make LLM backoff configurable end-to-end

- extend LLMConfig with backoff delay/attempt/factor fields and thread them
  through LLMExtractionStrategy, LLMContentFilter, table extraction, and
  Docker API handlers
- expose the backoff parameter knobs on perform_completion_with_backoff/aperform_completion_with_backoff
  and document them in the md_v2 guides

* reproduced AttributeError from #1642

* pass timeout parameter to docker client request

* added missing deep crawling objects to init

* generalized query in ContentRelevanceFilter to be a str or list

* import modules from enhanceable deserialization

* parameterized tests

* Fix: capture current page URL to reflect JavaScript navigation and add test for delayed redirects. ref #1268

* refactor: replace PyPDF2 with pypdf across the codebase. ref #1412

* announcement: add application form for cloud API closed beta

* Release v0.7.8: Stability & Bug Fix Release

- Updated version to 0.7.8
- Introduced focused stability release addressing 11 community-reported bugs.
- Key fixes include Docker API improvements, LLM extraction enhancements, URL handling corrections, and dependency updates.
- Added detailed release notes for v0.7.8 in the blog and created a dedicated verification script to ensure all fixes are functioning as intended.
- Updated documentation to reflect recent changes and improvements.

* docs: add section for Crawl4AI Cloud API closed beta with application link

* fix: add disk cleanup step to Docker workflow

---------

Co-authored-by: rbushria <rbushri@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: AHMET YILMAZ <tawfik@kidocode.com>
Co-authored-by: Soham Kukreti <kukretisoham@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Chris Murphy <chris.murphy@klaviyo.com>
Co-authored-by: Aravind Karnam <aravind.karanam@gmail.com>

docs/md_v2/complete-sdk-reference.md

@@ -1593,8 +1593,20 @@ The `clone()` method:
     - Environment variable - use with prefix "env:" <br/> eg:`api_token = "env: GROQ_API_KEY"`            
 3. **`base_url`**:  
    - If your provider has a custom endpoint
+
+4. **Backoff controls** *(optional)*:  
+   - `backoff_base_delay` *(default `2` seconds)* – how long to pause before the first retry if the provider rate-limits you.  
+   - `backoff_max_attempts` *(default `3`)* – total tries for the same prompt (initial call + retries).  
+   - `backoff_exponential_factor` *(default `2`)* – how quickly the pause grows between retries. A factor of 2 yields waits like 2s → 4s → 8s.  
+   - Because these plug into Crawl4AI’s retry helper, every LLM strategy automatically follows the pacing you define here.
 ```python
-llm_config = LLMConfig(provider="openai/gpt-4o-mini", api_token=os.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY"))
+llm_config = LLMConfig(
+    provider="openai/gpt-4o-mini",
+    api_token=os.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY"),
+    backoff_base_delay=1, # optional
+    backoff_max_attempts=5, # optional
+    backoff_exponential_factor=3, # optional
+)
 ```
 ## 4. Putting It All Together
 In a typical scenario, you define **one** `BrowserConfig` for your crawler session, then create **one or more** `CrawlerRunConfig` & `LLMConfig` depending on each call's needs: