Getting started

Two ways to run webclaw. The hosted API needs nothing installed and is below; self-hosting the open-source binary comes after it.

Hosted API

Nothing to install. Sign up at webclaw.io, copy the key from your dashboard, and run this. Every account starts on the free plan: 500 credits a month, no card. One credit is one page, and that includes JavaScript rendering, protected sites and AI extraction.

curl -X POST https://api.webclaw.io/v1/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer wc_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com", "formats": ["markdown"]}'

That returns the page as clean Markdown. Swap the URL for one you actually care about, including sites that usually block scrapers. Keys are prefixed with wc_.

Self-hosting: install the CLI

The CLI, server and MCP server are AGPL-3.0 and run on your own hardware with no account. They do not include the hosted bot-protection handling or residential egress.

Windows x64: prebuilt ZIP

Download the Windows x64 ZIP from GitHub Releases, extract it, and open PowerShell in the folder containing webclaw.exe. This installation does not require Rust.

.\webclaw.exe --version
.\webclaw.exe https://example.com --format markdown

PowerShell requires the current-directory prefix shown above. Add the extracted folder to your user PATH to run webclaw from other folders. If Windows reports a missing Visual C++ runtime DLL, install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for x64. Native Windows ARM64 is not covered.

With Cargo from Git

Requires Rust and native build tools. The package is webclaw-cli and the executable is webclaw; it is not installed from crates.io. A first build can take several minutes.

cargo install --git https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw.git --tag v0.6.22 --locked webclaw-cli

From source

Clone the repository and build all three binaries in release mode.

git clone --branch v0.6.22 https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw.git
cd webclaw
cargo build --release --locked

The binaries will be at target/release/webclaw, target/release/webclaw-server, and target/release/webclaw-mcp.

Docker

Pull the official image and run the API server in a container.

docker pull ghcr.io/0xmassi/webclaw:latest

docker run --rm -p 127.0.0.1:3000:3000 -e WEBCLAW_API_KEY=local-example-key ghcr.io/0xmassi/webclaw:latest webclaw-server

The server will be available at http://localhost:3000. Send Authorization: Bearer local-example-key with requests to this example container. Choose your own key for regular use.

Your first extraction

The simplest usage: pass a URL. webclaw extracts the main content and outputs clean markdown by default.

webclaw https://example.com

Switch to LLM-optimized output for the most token-efficient representation. This runs a pipeline that strips images, removes emphasis, deduplicates links, merges stat blocks, and collapses whitespace.

webclaw https://example.com -f llm

Use JSON format to get the full ExtractionResult with metadata, content, word count, and extracted URLs.

webclaw https://example.com -f json

Start the API server

The OSS REST server exposes supported extraction operations over HTTP. Start it on a local port.

webclaw-server --port 3000

Test it with a scrape request:

curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/v1/scrape \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com"}'

MCP server

The MCP server lets AI agents use webclaw as a tool. It communicates over stdio transport and works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenCode, Codex, Antigravity, and any MCP-compatible client.

Add webclaw to your Claude Desktop configuration at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "webclaw": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@webclaw/mcp"]
    }
  }
}

npx fetches the launcher automatically — no binary path or build step. To run a source build instead, point command at target/release/webclaw-mcp.

The MCP server exposes 12 tools:

Cloud API

For managed infrastructure, sign up at webclaw.io and create an API key from the dashboard. Keys are prefixed with wc_.

curl -X POST https://api.webclaw.io/v1/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer wc_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "formats": ["markdown", "llm"]}'

Hosted and OSS endpoints overlap, but their options and response shapes differ. In particular, hosted crawls are asynchronous and OSS crawls return results directly. Check the self-hosting capability matrix before switching base URLs.