Add comprehensive virtual scroll handling to capture all content from pages that use DOM recycling techniques (Twitter, Instagram, etc).
Key features:
- New VirtualScrollConfig class for configuring virtual scroll behavior
- Automatic detection of three scrolling scenarios: no change, content appended, content replaced
- Intelligent HTML chunk capture and merging with deduplication
- 100% content capture from virtual scroll pages
- Seamless integration with existing extraction strategies
- JavaScript-based detection and capture for performance
- Tree-based DOM merging with text-based deduplication
Documentation:
- Comprehensive guide at docs/md_v2/advanced/virtual-scroll.md
- API reference updates in parameters.md and page-interaction.md
- Blog article explaining the solution and techniques
- Complete examples with local test server
Testing:
- Full test suite achieving 100% capture of 1000 items
- Examples for Twitter timeline, Instagram grid scenarios
- Local test server with different scrolling behaviors
This enables scraping of modern websites that were previously impossible to fully capture with traditional scrolling techniques.
Add new RegexExtractionStrategy for fast, zero-LLM extraction of common data types:
- Built-in patterns for emails, URLs, phones, dates, and more
- Support for custom regex patterns
- LLM-assisted pattern generation utility
- Optimized HTML preprocessing with fit_html field
- Enhanced network response body capture
Breaking changes: None
- Add tables field to CrawlResult model while maintaining backward compatibility
- Update async_webcrawler.py to extract tables from media and pass to tables field
- Update crypto_analysis_example.py to use the new tables field
- Add /config/dump examples to demo_docker_api.py
- Bump version to 0.6.1
Major updates to Docker deployment infrastructure:
- Switch default port to 11235 for all services
- Add MCP (Model Context Protocol) support with WebSocket/SSE endpoints
- Simplify docker-compose.yml with auto-platform detection
- Update documentation with new features and examples
- Consolidate configuration and improve resource management
BREAKING CHANGE: Default port changed from 8020 to 11235. Update your configurations and deployment scripts accordingly.
This commit introduces several significant enhancements to the Crawl4AI Docker deployment:
1. Add MCP Protocol Support:
- Implement WebSocket and SSE transport layers for MCP server communication
- Create mcp_bridge.py to expose existing API endpoints via MCP protocol
- Add comprehensive tests for both socket and SSE transport methods
2. Enhance Docker Server Capabilities:
- Add PDF generation endpoint with file saving functionality
- Add screenshot capture endpoint with configurable wait time
- Implement JavaScript execution endpoint for dynamic page interaction
- Add intelligent file path handling for saving generated assets
3. Improve Search and Context Functionality:
- Implement syntax-aware code function chunking using AST parsing
- Add BM25-based intelligent document search with relevance scoring
- Create separate code and documentation context endpoints
- Enhance response format with structured results and scores
4. Rename and Fix File Organization:
- Fix typo in test_docker_config_gen.py filename
- Update import statements and dependencies
- Add FileResponse for context endpoints
This enhancement significantly improves the machine-to-machine communication
capabilities of Crawl4AI, making it more suitable for integration with LLM agents
and other automated systems.
The CHANGELOG update has been applied successfully, highlighting the key features and improvements made in this release. The commit message provides a detailed explanation of all the
changes, which will be helpful for tracking the project's evolution.
Adds a new content_source parameter to MarkdownGenerationStrategy that allows
selecting which HTML content to use for markdown generation:
- cleaned_html (default): uses post-processed HTML
- raw_html: uses original webpage HTML
- fit_html: uses preprocessed HTML for schema extraction
Changes include:
- Added content_source parameter to MarkdownGenerationStrategy
- Updated AsyncWebCrawler to handle HTML source selection
- Added examples and tests for the new feature
- Updated documentation with new parameter details
BREAKING CHANGE: Renamed cleaned_html parameter to input_html in generate_markdown()
method signature to better reflect its generalized purpose
Add max_pages parameter to all deep crawling strategies to limit total pages crawled.
Add score_threshold parameter to BFS/DFS strategies for quality control.
Remove legacy parameter handling in AsyncWebCrawler.
Improve error handling and logging in crawl strategies.
BREAKING CHANGE: Removed support for legacy parameters in AsyncWebCrawler.run_many()
This major release adds deep crawling capabilities, memory-adaptive dispatcher,
multiple crawling strategies, Docker deployment, and a new CLI. It also includes
significant improvements to proxy handling, PDF processing, and LLM integration.
BREAKING CHANGES:
- Add memory-adaptive dispatcher as default for arun_many()
- Move max_depth to CrawlerRunConfig
- Replace ScrapingMode enum with strategy pattern
- Update BrowserContext API
- Make model fields optional with defaults
- Remove content_filter parameter from CrawlerRunConfig
- Remove synchronous WebCrawler and old CLI
- Update Docker deployment configuration
- Replace FastFilterChain with FilterChain
- Change license to Apache 2.0 with attribution clause
Renames the final_url field to redirected_url across all components to maintain
consistent terminology throughout the codebase. This change affects:
- AsyncCrawlResponse model
- AsyncPlaywrightCrawlerStrategy
- Documentation and examples
No functional changes, purely naming consistency improvement.
Prepare the v0.4.3 beta release with major feature additions and improvements:
- Add JsonXPathExtractionStrategy and LLMContentFilter to exports
- Update version to 0.4.3b1
- Improve documentation for dispatchers and markdown generation
- Update development status to Beta
- Reorganize changelog format
BREAKING CHANGE: Memory threshold in MemoryAdaptiveDispatcher increased to 90% and SemaphoreDispatcher parameter renamed to max_session_permit
Add support for checking and respecting robots.txt rules before crawling websites:
- Implement RobotsParser class with SQLite caching
- Add check_robots_txt parameter to CrawlerRunConfig
- Integrate robots.txt checking in AsyncWebCrawler
- Update documentation with robots.txt compliance examples
- Add tests for robot parser functionality
The cache uses WAL mode for better concurrency and has a default TTL of 7 days.
Add proxy_config parameter to CrawlerRunConfig to support dynamic proxy configuration per crawl request. This enables users to specify different proxy settings for each crawl operation without modifying the browser config.
- Added proxy_config parameter to CrawlerRunConfig
- Updated BrowserManager to apply proxy settings from CrawlerRunConfig
- Updated proxy-security documentation with new usage examples
Adds new static method generate_schema() to JsonElementExtractionStrategy classes
that can automatically generate extraction schemas using LLM (OpenAI or Ollama).
This provides a convenient way to bootstrap extraction schemas while maintaining
the performance benefits of selector-based extraction.
Key changes:
- Added generate_schema() static method to base extraction strategy
- Added support for both CSS and XPath schema generation
- Updated documentation with examples and best practices
- Added new prompt templates for schema generation
- Fix crawler text mode for improved performance; cover missing `srcset` and `data_srcset` attributes in image tags.
- Introduced Managed Browsers for enhanced crawling experience.
- Updated documentation for clearer navigation on configuration.
- Changed 'text_only' to 'text_mode' in configuration and methods.
- Improved performance and relevance in content filtering strategies.
- ReImplemented JsonXPathExtractionStrategy for enhanced JSON data extraction.
- Updated existing extraction strategies for better performance.
- Improved handling of response status codes during crawls.
### New Features:
- **Text-Only Mode**: Added support for text-only crawling by disabling images, JavaScript, GPU, and other non-essential features.
- **Light Mode**: Optimized browser settings to reduce resource usage and improve efficiency during crawling.
- **Dynamic Viewport Adjustment**: Automatically adjusts viewport dimensions based on content size, ensuring accurate rendering and scaling.
- **Full Page Scanning**: Introduced a feature to scroll and capture dynamic content for pages with infinite scroll or lazy-loading elements.
- **Session Management**: Added `create_session` method for creating and managing browser sessions with unique IDs.
### Improvements:
- Unified viewport handling across contexts by dynamically setting dimensions using `self.viewport_width` and `self.viewport_height`.
- Enhanced logging and error handling for viewport adjustments, page scanning, and content evaluation.
- Reduced resource usage with additional browser flags for both `light_mode` and `text_only` configurations.
- Improved handling of cookies, headers, and proxies in session creation.
### Refactoring:
- Removed hardcoded viewport dimensions and replaced them with dynamic configurations.
- Cleaned up unused and commented-out code for better readability and maintainability.
- Introduced defaults for frequently used parameters like `delay_before_return_html`.
### Fixes:
- Resolved potential inconsistencies in viewport handling.
- Improved robustness of content loading and dynamic adjustments to avoid failures and timeouts.
### Docs Update:
- Updated schema usage in `quickstart_async.py` example:
- Changed `OpenAIModelFee.schema()` to `OpenAIModelFee.model_json_schema()` for compatibility.
- Enhanced LLM extraction instruction documentation.
This commit introduces significant enhancements to improve efficiency, flexibility, and reliability of the crawler strategy.
- Introduced the PruningContentFilter for better content relevance.
- Implemented comprehensive unit tests for verification of functionality.
- Enhanced existing BM25ContentFilter tests for edge case coverage.
- Updated documentation to include usage examples for new filter.
- Added new Docker commands for platform-specific builds.
- Updated README with comprehensive installation and setup instructions.
- Introduced `post_install` method in setup script for automation.
- Refined migration processes with enhanced error logging.
- Bump version to 0.3.746 and updated dependencies.
Major changes:
- Add browser takeover feature using CDP for authentic browsing
- Implement Docker support with full API server documentation
- Enhance Mockdown with tag preservation system
- Improve parallel crawling performance
This release focuses on authenticity and scalability, introducing the ability
to use users' own browsers while providing containerized deployment options.
Breaking changes include modified browser handling and API response structure.
See CHANGELOG.md for detailed migration guide.
• Add smart overlay removal system for handling popups and modals
• Improve screenshot functionality with configurable timing controls
• Implement URL normalization and enhanced link processing
• Add custom base directory support for cache storage
• Refine external content filtering and social media domain handling
This commit significantly improves the crawler's ability to handle modern
websites by automatically removing intrusive overlays and providing better
screenshot capabilities. URL handling is now more robust with proper
normalization and duplicate detection. The cache system is more flexible
with customizable base directory support.
Breaking changes: None
Issue numbers: None
- Add support for extracting Base64 encoded images
- Improve image format detection to include Base64 images
- Enhance compatibility with locally saved HTML files using Base64 image encoding
- Update version number to 0.3.71
- Add sleep_on_close option to AsyncPlaywrightCrawlerStrategy
- Enhance context creation with additional options
- Improve error message formatting and visibility
- Update quickstart documentation
- Implement playwright_stealth for better bot detection avoidance
- Add user simulation and navigator override options
- Improve iframe processing and browser selection
- Enhance error reporting and debugging capabilities
- Optimize image processing and parallel crawling
- Add new example for user simulation feature
- Added support for including links in Markdown content, by definin g a new flag `include_links_on_markdown` in `crawl` method.
- Add before_retrieve_html hook and delay_before_return_html option
- Implement flexible page_timeout for smart_wait function
- Support extra_args and custom headers in LLM extraction
- Allow arbitrary kwargs in AsyncWebCrawler initialization
- Improve perform_completion_with_backoff for custom API calls
- Update examples with new features and diverse LLM providers
- Implement smart_wait function in AsyncPlaywrightCrawlerStrategy
- Add screenshot support to AsyncCrawlResponse and AsyncWebCrawler
- Improve error handling and timeout management in crawling process
- Fix typo in CrawlResult model (responser_headers -> response_headers)
- Update .gitignore to exclude additional files
- Adjust import path in test_basic_crawling.py
Significant improvements in text processing and performance:
- 🚀 **Dependency reduction**: Removed dependency on spaCy model for text chunk labeling in cosine extraction strategy.
- 🤖 **Transformer upgrade**: Implemented text sequence classification using a transformer model for labeling text chunks.
- ⚡ **Performance enhancement**: Improved model loading speed due to removal of spaCy dependency.
- 🔧 **Future-proofing**: Laid groundwork for potential complete removal of spaCy dependency in future versions.
These changes address issue #68 and provide a foundation for faster, more efficient text processing in Crawl4AI.
