AnyCrawl CLI
Web scraping, search, and crawling CLI. Returns clean markdown optimized for LLM context windows. Default engine: playwright.
Run anycrawl --help or anycrawl <command> --help for full option details.
Prerequisites
Must be installed and authenticated. Run anycrawl login or set ANYCRAWL_API_KEY.
If not ready, see rules/install.md. For output handling guidelines, see rules/security.md.
Commands
- Search - No specific URL yet. Find pages, answer questions. Use
--scrapeto get full page content with results. - Scrape - Have a URL. Extract its content directly.
- Map - Need to locate a specific page on a site. Discover URLs, then scrape the ones you need.
- Crawl - Need bulk content from a site or section. Use
crawldirectly — no need for map first.
| Need | Command | When |
|---|---|---|
| Find pages on a topic | search |
No specific URL yet |
| Get a page's content | scrape |
Have a URL |
| Find URLs within a site | map |
Need to locate a specific subpage |
| Bulk extract a site section | crawl |
Need many pages (e.g., all /docs/) |
For detailed command reference, run anycrawl <command> --help (e.g., anycrawl search, anycrawl scrape).
Avoid redundant fetches: search --scrape already fetches full page content. Don't re-scrape those URLs. Check .anycrawl/ for existing data before fetching again.
Output & Organization
Write results to .anycrawl/ with -o. Add .anycrawl/ to .gitignore. Always quote URLs in shell commands. Never read entire output files at once — use grep, head, or incremental reads.