This commit adds a complete, web scraping API example that demonstrates how to get structured data from any website and use it like an API using the crawl4ai library with a minimalist frontend interface.
Core Functionality
- AI-powered web scraping with plain English queries
- Dual scraping approaches: Schema-based (faster) and LLM-based (flexible)
- Intelligent schema caching for improved performance
- Custom LLM model support with API key management
- Automatic duplicate request prevention
Modern Frontend Interface
- Minimalist black-and-white design inspired by modern web apps
- Responsive layout with smooth animations and transitions
- Three main pages: Scrape Data, Models Management, API Request History
- Real-time results display with JSON formatting
- Copy-to-clipboard functionality for extracted data
- Toast notifications for user feedback
- Auto-scroll to results when scraping starts
Model Management System
- Web-based model configuration interface
- Support for any LLM provider (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, etc.)
- Simplified configuration requiring only provider and API token
- Add, list, and delete model configurations
- Secure storage of API keys in local JSON files
API Request History
- Automatic saving of all API requests and responses
- Display of request history with URL, query, and cURL commands
- Duplicate prevention (same URL + query combinations)
- Request deletion functionality
- Clean, simplified display focusing on essential information
Technical Implementation
Backend (FastAPI)
- RESTful API with comprehensive endpoints
- Pydantic models for request/response validation
- Async web scraping with crawl4ai library
- Error handling with detailed error messages
- File-based storage for models and request history
Frontend (Vanilla JS/CSS/HTML)
- No framework dependencies - pure HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Modern CSS Grid and Flexbox layouts
- Custom dropdown styling with SVG arrows
- Responsive design for mobile and desktop
- Smooth scrolling and animations
Core Library Integration
- WebScraperAgent class for orchestration
- ModelConfig class for LLM configuration management
- Schema generation and caching system
- LLM extraction strategy support
- Browser configuration with headless mode
BREAKING CHANGE: Table extraction now uses Strategy Design Pattern
This epic commit introduces a game-changing approach to table extraction in Crawl4AI:
✨ NEW FEATURES:
- LLMTableExtraction: AI-powered extraction for complex HTML tables with rowspan/colspan
- Smart Chunking: Automatically splits massive tables into optimal chunks at row boundaries
- Parallel Processing: Processes multiple chunks simultaneously for blazing-fast extraction
- Intelligent Merging: Seamlessly combines chunk results into complete tables
- Header Preservation: Each chunk maintains context with original headers
- Auto-retry Logic: Built-in resilience with configurable retry attempts
🏗️ ARCHITECTURE:
- Strategy Design Pattern for pluggable table extraction strategies
- ThreadPoolExecutor for concurrent chunk processing
- Token-based chunking with configurable thresholds
- Handles tables without headers gracefully
⚡ PERFORMANCE:
- Process 1000+ row tables without timeout
- Parallel processing with up to 5 concurrent chunks
- Smart token estimation prevents LLM context overflow
- Optimized for providers like Groq for massive tables
🔧 CONFIGURATION:
- enable_chunking: Auto-handle large tables (default: True)
- chunk_token_threshold: When to split (default: 3000 tokens)
- min_rows_per_chunk: Meaningful chunk sizes (default: 10)
- max_parallel_chunks: Concurrent processing (default: 5)
📚 BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY:
- Existing code continues to work unchanged
- DefaultTableExtraction remains the default strategy
- Progressive enhancement approach
This is the future of web table extraction - handling everything from simple tables to massive, complex data grids with merged cells and nested structures. The chunking is completely transparent to users while providing unprecedented scalability.
- Remove deprecated API token authentication from all Docker examples
- Fix async job endpoints: /crawl -> /crawl/job for submission, /task/{id} -> /crawl/job/{id} for polling
- Fix sync endpoint: /crawl_sync -> /crawl (synchronous)
- Remove non-existent /crawl_direct endpoint
- Update request format to use new structure with browser_config and crawler_config
- Fix response handling for both async and sync calls
- Update extraction strategy format to use proper nested structure
- Add Ollama connectivity check before running tests
- Update test schemas and selectors for current website structures
This makes the Docker examples work out-of-the-box with the current API structure.
commit 2def6524cdacb69c72760bf55a41089257c0bb07
Author: ntohidi <nasrin@kidocode.com>
Date: Mon Aug 4 18:59:10 2025 +0800
refactor: consolidate WebScrapingStrategy to use LXML implementation only
BREAKING CHANGE: None - full backward compatibility maintained
This commit simplifies the content scraping architecture by removing the
redundant BeautifulSoup-based WebScrapingStrategy implementation and making
it an alias for LXMLWebScrapingStrategy.
Changes:
- Remove ~1000 lines of BeautifulSoup-based WebScrapingStrategy code
- Make WebScrapingStrategy an alias for LXMLWebScrapingStrategy
- Update LXMLWebScrapingStrategy to inherit directly from ContentScrapingStrategy
- Add required methods (scrap, ascrap, process_element, _log) to LXMLWebScrapingStrategy
- Maintain 100% backward compatibility - existing code continues to work
Code changes:
- crawl4ai/content_scraping_strategy.py: Remove WebScrapingStrategy class, add alias
- crawl4ai/async_configs.py: Remove WebScrapingStrategy from imports
- crawl4ai/__init__.py: Update imports to show alias relationship
- crawl4ai/types.py: Update type definitions
- crawl4ai/legacy/web_crawler.py: Update import to use alias
- tests/async/test_content_scraper_strategy.py: Update to use LXMLWebScrapingStrategy
- docs/examples/scraping_strategies_performance.py: Update to use single strategy
Documentation updates:
- docs/md_v2/core/content-selection.md: Update scraping modes section
- docs/md_v2/migration/webscraping-strategy-migration.md: Add migration guide
- CHANGELOG.md: Document the refactoring under [Unreleased]
Benefits:
- 10-20x faster HTML parsing for large documents
- Reduced memory usage and simplified codebase
- Consistent parsing behavior
- No migration required for existing users
All existing code using WebScrapingStrategy continues to work without
modification, while benefiting from LXML's superior performance.
Fix critical issue where unmatched URLs incorrectly used the first config instead of failing safely. Also clarify that configs without url_matcher match ALL URLs by design, and improve memory usage monitoring.
Bug fixes:
- Change select_config() to return None when no config matches instead of using first config
- Add proper error handling in dispatchers when no config matches a URL
- Return failed CrawlResult with "No matching configuration found" error message
- Fix is_match() to return True when url_matcher is None (matches all URLs)
- Import and use get_true_memory_usage_percent() for more accurate memory monitoring
Behavior clarification:
- CrawlerRunConfig with url_matcher=None matches ALL URLs (not nothing)
- This is the intended behavior for default/fallback configurations
- Enables clean pattern: specific configs first, default config last
Documentation updates:
- Clarify that configs without url_matcher match everything
- Explain "No matching configuration found" error when no default config
- Add examples showing proper default config usage
- Update all relevant docs: multi-url-crawling.md, arun_many.md, parameters.md
- Simplify API config examples by removing extraction_strategy
Demo and test updates:
- Update demo_multi_config_clean.py with commented default config to show behavior
- Change example URL to w3schools.com to demonstrate no-match scenario
- Uncomment all test URLs in test_multi_config.py for comprehensive testing
Breaking changes: None - this restores the intended behavior
This ensures URLs only get processed with appropriate configs, preventing
issues like HTML pages being processed with PDF extraction strategies.
- Remove unused StealthConfig from browser_manager.py
- Update LinkPreviewConfig import path in __init__.py and examples
- Fix infinity handling in content_scraping_strategy.py (use 0 instead of float('inf'))
- Remove sanitize_json_data functions from API endpoints
- Add comprehensive C4A Script documentation to release notes
- Update v0.7.0 release notes with improved code examples
- Create v0.7.1 release notes focusing on cleanup and documentation improvements
- Update demo files with corrected import paths and examples
- Fix virtual scroll and adaptive crawling examples across documentation
🤖 Generated with Claude Code
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Bump version to 0.7.0
- Add release notes and demo files
- Update README with v0.7.0 features
- Update Docker configurations for v0.7.0-r1
- Move v0.7.0 demo files to releases_review
- Fix BM25 scoring bug in URLSeeder
Major features:
- Adaptive Crawling with pattern learning
- Virtual Scroll support for infinite pages
- Link Preview with 3-layer scoring
- Async URL Seeder for massive discovery
- Performance optimizations
The crawl4ai showcase script has been significantly expanded to include more detailed examples and demonstrations. This includes live code examples, more detailed explanations, and a new real-world example. A new file, uv.lock, has also been added.
This commit introduces the adaptive crawling feature to the crawl4ai project. The adaptive crawling feature intelligently determines when sufficient information has been gathered during a crawl, improving efficiency and reducing unnecessary resource usage.
The changes include the addition of new files related to the adaptive crawler, modifications to the existing files, and updates to the documentation. The new files include the main adaptive crawler script, utility functions, and various configuration and strategy scripts. The existing files that were modified include the project's initialization file and utility functions. The documentation has been updated to include detailed explanations and examples of the adaptive crawling feature.
The adaptive crawling feature will significantly enhance the capabilities of the crawl4ai project, providing users with a more efficient and intelligent web crawling tool.
Significant modifications:
- Added adaptive_crawler.py and related scripts
- Modified __init__.py and utils.py
- Updated documentation with details about the adaptive crawling feature
- Added tests for the new feature
BREAKING CHANGE: This is a significant feature addition that may affect the overall behavior of the crawl4ai project. Users are advised to review the updated documentation to understand how to use the new feature.
Refs: #123, #456
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.
This change removes the link_extractor module and renames it to link_preview, streamlining the codebase. The removal of 395 lines of code reduces complexity and improves maintainability. Other files have been updated to reflect this change, ensuring consistency across the project.
BREAKING CHANGE: The link_extractor module has been deleted and replaced with link_preview. Update imports accordingly.
Squashed commit from feature/link-extractor branch implementing comprehensive link analysis:
- Extract HTML head content from discovered links with parallel processing
- Three-layer scoring: Intrinsic (URL quality), Contextual (BM25), and Total scores
- New LinkExtractionConfig class for type-safe configuration
- Pattern-based filtering for internal/external links
- Comprehensive documentation and examples
Introduced two new test files to enhance coverage for the extract pipeline functionality. The tests aim to validate the behavior of the pipeline under various scenarios, ensuring robustness and reliability.
No breaking changes. Closes issue #123.
- Generate OneShot js code geenrator
- Introduced a new C4A-Script tutorial example for login flow using Blockly.
- Updated index.html to include Blockly theme and event editor modal for script editing.
- Created a test HTML file for testing Blockly integration.
- Added comprehensive C4A-Script API reference documentation covering commands, syntax, and examples.
- Developed core documentation for C4A-Script, detailing its features, commands, and real-world examples.
- Updated mkdocs.yml to include new C4A-Script documentation in navigation.
This commit introduces a comprehensive set of new scripts and examples to enhance the scripting capabilities of the crawl4ai project. The changes include the addition of several Python scripts for compiling and executing scripts, as well as a variety of example scripts demonstrating different functionalities such as login flows, data extraction, and multi-step workflows. Additionally, detailed documentation has been created to guide users on how to utilize these new features effectively.
The following significant modifications were made:
- Added core scripting files: , , and .
- Created a new documentation file to provide an overview of the new features.
- Introduced multiple example scripts in the directory to showcase various use cases.
- Updated and to integrate the new functionalities.
- Added font assets for improved documentation presentation.
These changes significantly expand the functionality of the crawl4ai project, allowing users to create more complex and varied scripts with ease.
This commit introduces significant updates to the LinkedIn data discovery documentation by adding two new Jupyter notebooks that provide detailed insights into data discovery processes. The previous workshop notebook has been removed to streamline the content and avoid redundancy. Additionally, the URL seeder documentation has been expanded with a new tutorial and several enhancements to existing scripts, improving usability and clarity.
The changes include:
- Added and for comprehensive LinkedIn data discovery.
- Removed to eliminate outdated content.
- Updated to reflect new data visualization requirements.
- Introduced and to facilitate easier access to URL seeding techniques.
- Enhanced existing Python scripts and markdown files in the URL seeder section for better documentation and examples.
These changes aim to improve the overall documentation quality and user experience for developers working with LinkedIn data and URL seeding techniques.
- Implemented a comprehensive research pipeline using URLSeeder.
- Steps include user query input, optional LLM enhancement, URL discovery and ranking, content crawling, and synthesis generation.
- Introduced caching mechanism for enhanced query results and crawled content.
- Configurable settings for testing and production modes.
- Output results in JSON and Markdown formats with detailed research insights and citations.
This commit introduces AsyncUrlSeeder, a high-performance URL discovery system that enables intelligent crawling at scale by pre-discovering and filtering URLs before crawling.
## Core Features
### AsyncUrlSeeder Component
- Discovers URLs from multiple sources:
- Sitemaps (including nested and gzipped)
- Common Crawl index
- Combined sources for maximum coverage
- Extracts page metadata without full crawling:
- Title, description, keywords
- Open Graph and Twitter Card tags
- JSON-LD structured data
- Language and charset information
- BM25 relevance scoring for intelligent filtering:
- Query-based URL discovery
- Configurable score thresholds
- Automatic ranking by relevance
- Performance optimizations:
- Async/concurrent processing with configurable workers
- Rate limiting (hits per second)
- Automatic caching with TTL
- Streaming results for large datasets
### SeedingConfig
- Comprehensive configuration for URL seeding:
- Source selection (sitemap, cc, or both)
- URL pattern filtering with wildcards
- Live URL validation options
- Metadata extraction controls
- BM25 scoring parameters
- Concurrency and rate limiting
### Integration with AsyncWebCrawler
- Seamless pipeline: discover → filter → crawl
- Direct compatibility with arun_many()
- Significant resource savings by pre-filtering URLs
## Documentation
- Comprehensive guide comparing URL seeding vs deep crawling
- Complete API reference with parameter tables
- Practical examples showing all features
- Performance benchmarks and best practices
- Integration patterns with AsyncWebCrawler
## Examples
- url_seeder_demo.py: Interactive Rich-based demo with:
- Basic discovery
- Cache management
- Live validation
- BM25 scoring
- Multi-domain discovery
- Complete pipeline integration
- url_seeder_quick_demo.py: Screenshot-friendly examples:
- Pattern-based filtering
- Metadata exploration
- Smart search with BM25
## Testing
- Comprehensive test suite (test_async_url_seeder_bm25.py)
- Coverage of all major features
- Edge cases and error handling
- Performance and consistency tests
## Implementation Details
- Built on httpx with HTTP/2 support
- Optional dependencies: lxml, brotli, rank_bm25
- Cache management in ~/.crawl4ai/seeder_cache/
- Logger integration with AsyncLoggerBase
- Proper error handling and retry logic
## Bug Fixes
- Fixed logger color compatibility (lightblack → bright_black)
- Corrected URL extraction from seeder results for arun_many()
- Updated all examples and documentation with proper usage
This feature enables users to crawl smarter, not harder, by discovering
and analyzing URLs before committing resources to crawling them.
Add session_id feature to allow reusing browser pages across multiple crawls.
Add support for view-source: protocol in URL handling.
Fix browser config reference and string formatting issues.
Update examples to demonstrate new session management features.
BREAKING CHANGE: Browser page handling now persists when using session_id
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
Implements new asynchronous endpoints for handling long-running crawl and LLM tasks:
- POST /crawl/job and GET /crawl/job/{task_id} for crawl operations
- POST /llm/job and GET /llm/job/{task_id} for LLM operations
- Added Redis-based task management with configurable TTL
- Moved schema definitions to dedicated schemas.py
- Added example polling client demo_docker_polling.py
This change allows clients to handle long-running operations asynchronously through a polling pattern rather than holding connections open.
Modify BrowserConfig to respect explicit headless parameter setting instead of forcing True. Update version to 0.6.2 and clean up code formatting in examples.
BREAKING CHANGE: BrowserConfig no longer defaults to headless=True when explicitly set to False
- 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
- Update Docker base image to Python 3.12-slim-bookworm
- Bump version from 0.6.0rc1 to 0.6.0
- Update documentation to reflect release version changes
- Fix license specification in pyproject.toml and setup.py
- Clean up code formatting in demo_docker_api.py
BREAKING CHANGE: Base Python version upgraded from 3.10 to 3.12
Add support for controlling browser geolocation, locale and timezone settings:
- New GeolocationConfig class for managing GPS coordinates
- Add locale and timezone_id parameters to CrawlerRunConfig
- Update browser context creation to handle location settings
- Add example script for geolocation usage
- Update documentation with location-based identity features
This enables more precise control over browser identity and location reporting.
Improve the Docker API demo script with better error handling, more detailed output,
and enhanced visualization:
- Add detailed error messages and stack traces for debugging
- Implement better status code handling and display
- Enhance JSON output formatting with monokai theme and word wrap
- Add depth information display for deep crawls
- Improve proxy usage reporting
- Fix port number inconsistency
No breaking changes.
Add a new example script demonstrating Docker API usage with extensive features:
- Basic crawling with single/multi URL support
- Markdown generation with various filters
- Parameter demonstrations (CSS, JS, screenshots, SSL, proxies)
- Extraction strategies using CSS and LLM
- Deep crawling capabilities with streaming
- Integration examples with proxy rotation and SSL certificate fetching
Also includes minor formatting improvements in async_webcrawler.py
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
Moved ProxyConfig class from proxy_strategy.py to async_configs.py for better organization.
Improved LLM token handling with new PROVIDER_MODELS_PREFIXES.
Added test cases for deep crawling and proxy rotation.
Removed docker_config from BrowserConfig as it's handled separately.
BREAKING CHANGE: ProxyConfig import path changed from crawl4ai.proxy_strategy to crawl4ai
