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crawl4ai

You are an expert in Crawl4AI, the open-source web crawler built for AI applications. You help developers extract clean, structured data from websites for LLM training, RAG pipelines, and content analysis — with automatic markdown conversion, JavaScript rendering, CSS-based extraction, LLM-powered structured extraction, and session management for multi-page crawling.

#web-scraping#crawling#llm#markdown#extraction#ai#python
terminal-skillsv1.0.0
Works with:claude-codeopenai-codexgemini-clicursor
Source

Usage

$
✓ Installed crawl4ai v1.0.0

Getting Started

  1. Install the skill using the command above
  2. Open your AI coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, or Cursor)
  3. Reference the skill in your prompt
  4. The AI will use the skill's capabilities automatically

Example Prompts

  • "Review the open pull requests and summarize what needs attention"
  • "Generate a changelog from the last 20 commits on the main branch"

Information

Version
1.0.0
Author
terminal-skills
Category
AI & Machine Learning
License
Apache-2.0

Documentation

You are an expert in Crawl4AI, the open-source web crawler built for AI applications. You help developers extract clean, structured data from websites for LLM training, RAG pipelines, and content analysis — with automatic markdown conversion, JavaScript rendering, CSS-based extraction, LLM-powered structured extraction, and session management for multi-page crawling.

Core Capabilities

Basic Crawling

python
from crawl4ai import AsyncWebCrawler, CrawlerRunConfig, CacheMode

async with AsyncWebCrawler() as crawler:
    result = await crawler.arun(
        url="https://docs.example.com/getting-started",
        config=CrawlerRunConfig(
            word_count_threshold=10,       # Skip blocks with <10 words
            cache_mode=CacheMode.ENABLED,
        ),
    )

    print(result.markdown)                 # Clean markdown (LLM-ready)
    print(result.cleaned_html)             # Cleaned HTML
    print(result.media["images"])          # Extracted images
    print(result.links["internal"])        # Internal links
    print(result.links["external"])        # External links
    print(result.metadata)                 # Title, description, keywords

LLM-Powered Structured Extraction

python
from crawl4ai import AsyncWebCrawler, CrawlerRunConfig
from crawl4ai.extraction_strategy import LLMExtractionStrategy
from pydantic import BaseModel

class Product(BaseModel):
    name: str
    price: float
    description: str
    rating: float | None
    features: list[str]

extraction = LLMExtractionStrategy(
    provider="openai/gpt-4o-mini",
    api_token=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"],
    schema=Product.model_json_schema(),
    instruction="Extract all products from this page",
)

async with AsyncWebCrawler() as crawler:
    result = await crawler.arun(
        url="https://shop.example.com/keyboards",
        config=CrawlerRunConfig(extraction_strategy=extraction),
    )

    products = [Product(**p) for p in json.loads(result.extracted_content)]
    for p in products:
        print(f"{p.name}: ${p.price}{p.rating}★")

CSS-Based Extraction (No LLM)

python
from crawl4ai.extraction_strategy import JsonCssExtractionStrategy

schema = {
    "name": "Product listings",
    "baseSelector": ".product-card",       # Repeating element
    "fields": [
        {"name": "title", "selector": "h3.product-title", "type": "text"},
        {"name": "price", "selector": ".price", "type": "text"},
        {"name": "url", "selector": "a", "type": "attribute", "attribute": "href"},
        {"name": "image", "selector": "img", "type": "attribute", "attribute": "src"},
    ],
}

extraction = JsonCssExtractionStrategy(schema)

async with AsyncWebCrawler() as crawler:
    result = await crawler.arun(
        url="https://shop.example.com/all",
        config=CrawlerRunConfig(
            extraction_strategy=extraction,
            js_code="window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);",  # Scroll to load more
            wait_for=".product-card:nth-child(20)",                     # Wait for 20 items
        ),
    )
    products = json.loads(result.extracted_content)

Multi-Page Crawling

python
from crawl4ai import AsyncWebCrawler, CrawlerRunConfig

async with AsyncWebCrawler() as crawler:
    # Session-based: maintains cookies, auth state
    session_id = "docs-crawl"

    # Login first
    await crawler.arun(
        url="https://docs.example.com/login",
        config=CrawlerRunConfig(
            session_id=session_id,
            js_code="""
                document.querySelector('#email').value = 'user@example.com';
                document.querySelector('#password').value = 'pass';
                document.querySelector('form').submit();
            """,
            wait_for="#dashboard",
        ),
    )

    # Crawl authenticated pages
    urls = ["https://docs.example.com/api", "https://docs.example.com/guides"]
    for url in urls:
        result = await crawler.arun(
            url=url,
            config=CrawlerRunConfig(session_id=session_id),
        )
        # Save markdown for RAG indexing
        save_to_knowledge_base(url, result.markdown)

Installation

bash
pip install crawl4ai
crawl4ai-setup                             # Install Playwright browsers

Best Practices

  1. Markdown output — Use result.markdown for LLM/RAG input; clean, structured, no HTML noise
  2. CSS extraction — Use JsonCssExtractionStrategy for structured pages; no LLM cost, fast, deterministic
  3. LLM extraction — Use LLMExtractionStrategy for unstructured pages; Pydantic schema ensures valid output
  4. JavaScript rendering — Crawl4AI uses Playwright; handles SPAs, infinite scroll, dynamic content
  5. Sessions — Use session_id for multi-page crawls; maintains cookies, auth state across requests
  6. Caching — Enable CacheMode.ENABLED for development; avoid re-crawling the same pages
  7. Wait conditions — Use wait_for CSS selectors to ensure content is loaded before extraction
  8. Rate limiting — Add delays between requests; respect robots.txt; be a good citizen