Web Scraper Toolkit

Expertly crafted by Roy Dawson IV

Use Case Synopsis

Web Scraper Toolkit is a production-grade scraping and browser automation platform for:

• Engineers and analysts who need repeatable, scriptable web extraction.
• Red/blue team workflows that need transparent anti-bot diagnostics and safe automation controls.
• Agent builders who need MCP tools for autonomous URL ingestion, crawling, extraction, and post-processing.

You can run it as:

1. A CLI tool (web-scraper)
2. An MCP server (web-scraper-server)
3. A Python library (typed config + async APIs)

What it does (without reading code)

Core scraping and extraction

• Single-page scrape, batch scrape, and domain crawling.
• Sitemap ingestion and tree extraction.
• Markdown, text, HTML, JSON, XML, CSV, screenshot, and PDF outputs.
• Contact extraction (emails, phones, socials).

Browser intelligence and anti-bot handling

• Playwright-first automation with stealth profile controls.
• Native browser fallback routing (chrome, msedge, chromium) when blocked.
• Interactive browser MCP tools for navigate/click/type/wait/key/scroll/hover/evaluate/screenshot.
• Compact interaction-map MCP output for LLM-friendly clickable-element discovery.
• Optional accessibility-tree MCP output for role/name-first autonomous navigation.
• Script-level diagnostics for detection analysis and route optimization.

Dynamic host learning (auto-routing)

• Per-domain host profiles in host_profiles.json.
• Safe-subset auto-learning of routing strategy.
• Promotion only after clean incognito successes (default threshold: 2).
• Deterministic precedence: explicit override > host profile > global config > defaults.

Out-of-the-box behavior ("just works")

Default behavior is tuned for safety + resilience:

• Playwright Chromium is the default primary browser path.
• Incognito-style contexts by default.
• Native fallback policy defaults to on_blocked.
• Host profile learning is enabled by default.
• Host profile read-only mode is available (host_profiles_read_only=true) to apply-only with no writes.
• Host profile store is auto-created when needed.
• If host profile persistence cannot initialize, toolkit continues with clear diagnostic metadata.
• OS-level anti-bot interaction is blocked in headless mode.
• Before OS mouse takeover, toolkit warns the operator and verifies active foreground window.
• Cloudflare Turnstile challenges are handled autonomously by dynamically disabling detection-vulnerable stealth scripts to allow native auto-validation.
• Google Search (SERP) requests are automatically detected and routed through a specialized Native Chrome Hardware Spoofing bypass block to prevent 429 Too Many Requests (sorry/index) bans.
• If Google enforces a persistent soft-ban, the toolkit transparently falls back to the resilient DuckDuckGo HTML endpoint to guarantee unblockable organic search extraction.

Quick Start (60 seconds)

pip install web-scraper-toolkit
playwright install

Optional desktop solver support:

pip install web-scraper-toolkit[desktop]
playwright install

Run a first scrape:

web-scraper --url https://example.com --format markdown --export

End-to-End Flow

Simple flow

Advanced flow (dynamic routing)

These diagrams are rendered from Mermaid source files for GitHub/PyPI compatibility. Sources: docs/diagrams/*.mmd

How to Use It

1) CLI (fastest entry)

Minimal:

web-scraper --url https://example.com --format markdown --export

Batch + merge:

web-scraper --input urls.txt --workers auto --format text --merge --output-name merged.txt

Diagnostics wrapper:

web-scraper --run-diagnostic challenge_matrix --diagnostic-url https://target-site.tld/resource --diagnostic-runs-per-variant 2

Optional toolkit auto-commit (off by default):

web-scraper --run-diagnostic toolkit_route --diagnostic-url https://target-site.tld/resource --diagnostic-auto-commit-host-profile

Strict progression gating + artifact capture:

web-scraper \
  --run-diagnostic toolkit_route \
  --diagnostic-url https://target-site.tld/resource \
  --diagnostic-require-2xx \
  --diagnostic-save-artifacts \
  --diagnostic-artifacts-dir ./scripts/out/artifacts

Deterministic fixture replay / recording for regression analysis:

python scripts/diag_toolkit_route.py --fixture-replay ./tests/fixtures/challenge/cloudflare_blocked.json
python scripts/diag_toolkit_route.py --url https://target-site.tld/resource --fixture-record ./tests/fixtures/challenge/latest_toolkit_fixture.json
python scripts/diag_challenge_matrix.py --fixture-replay ./tests/fixtures/challenge/zoominfo_px_then_cf_loop.json

Cloudflare stealth-strategy matrix testing:

python scripts/diag_cloudflare_matrix.py --url https://target-site.tld/challenge

2) MCP (agentic mode)

Local stdio:

web-scraper-server --stdio

Remote transport:

web-scraper-server --transport streamable-http --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000 --path /mcp

3) Python API

import asyncio
from web_scraper_toolkit.browser.config import BrowserConfig
from web_scraper_toolkit.browser.playwright_handler import PlaywrightManager

async def main() -> None:
    cfg = BrowserConfig.from_dict({
        "headless": True,
        "browser_type": "chromium",
        "native_fallback_policy": "on_blocked",
        "host_profiles_enabled": True,
        "host_profiles_path": "./host_profiles.json",
        "host_profiles_read_only": False,
    })

    async with PlaywrightManager(cfg) as manager:
        content, final_url, status = await manager.smart_fetch("https://example.com")
        print({"status": status, "url": final_url, "has_content": bool(content)})

asyncio.run(main())

Safety Model (OS input + anti-bot interactions)

When toolkit enters OS-level mouse challenge solving:

• It warns the operator before input takeover.
• It validates that the browser is foreground/active.
• It verifies click/hold coordinates are inside active window bounds.
• It refuses OS interaction in headless mode.
• pyautogui failsafe remains active (move cursor to a screen corner to abort).

Optional env override:

• WST_OS_INPUT_WARNING_SECONDS (default: 3)

Configuration Model

Precedence order:

1. Explicit CLI/MCP arguments
2. Environment variables (WST_*)
3. settings.local.cfg / settings.cfg
4. config.json
5. Built-in defaults

Key files:

• config.example.json
• settings.example.cfg
• host_profiles.example.json
• INSTRUCTIONS.md (full operations runbook)

Full Usage and Operations

For exhaustive setup, deployment, troubleshooting, CLI/MCP option coverage, and diagnostics workflows, read:

• INSTRUCTIONS.md
• docs/config_schema.md (config + host profile schema contract)
• docs/api_stability.md (API/deprecation policy)
• docs/support_matrix.md (platform/browser support matrix)
• docs/release_checklist.md (ship checklist)

Canonical script diagnostics now use scripts/diag_*.py names.

Truthfulness note:

• challenge diagnostics now classify pages from visible text + structure, not raw HTML noise
• fixture replay is browserless and safe for deterministic regression checks
• live smoke results may still fail when a target changes, but the toolkit now reports those failures more accurately

Verified Outputs

The following output blocks are copied from deterministic command runs in this repository.

Verified Output A — diag_toolkit_zoominfo --help

Command:

python scripts/diag_toolkit_zoominfo.py --help

Expected output:

usage: diag_toolkit_zoominfo.py [-h] [--url URL] [--timeout-ms TIMEOUT_MS]
                                [--skip-interactive]
                                [--include-headless-stage]
                                [--log-level {DEBUG,INFO,WARNING,ERROR}]
                                [--auto-commit-host-profile]
                                [--host-profiles-path HOST_PROFILES_PATH]
                                [--read-only] [--require-2xx]
                                [--save-artifacts]
                                [--artifacts-dir ARTIFACTS_DIR]

Verified Output B — CLI includes strict/artifact diagnostic flags

Command:

python -m web_scraper_toolkit.cli --help

Expected excerpt:

  --diagnostic-require-2xx
                        Require final HTTP 2xx status for toolkit diagnostic
                        stage success.
  --diagnostic-save-artifacts
                        Persist per-stage diagnostic artifacts for toolkit
                        route diagnostics.
  --diagnostic-artifacts-dir DIAGNOSTIC_ARTIFACTS_DIR
                        Optional artifacts directory override for toolkit
                        route diagnostics.

Verified Output C — mocked diagnostic report payload (from deterministic test)

File/fixture expectation used in tests/test_script_diagnostics.py:

{
  "summary": {
    "progressed_stages": 1
  }
}

Production Deployment Checklist

Before release tags, execute and verify:

ruff format --check .
ruff check src
mypy
pytest -q -m "not integration"
python -m build
python -m twine check dist/*
python scripts/clean_workspace.py --dry-run

For full release/security gates, see docs/release_checklist.md.

Support Matrix

• Python: 3.10–3.13
• OS: Windows, Linux, macOS
• Native fallback channels: chrome, msedge, chromium
• Interactive OS-level challenge solving: headed desktop sessions only

Details and limitations: docs/support_matrix.md.

Author & Links

Created by: Roy Dawson IV
GitHub: https://github.com/imyourboyroy
PyPi: https://pypi.org/user/ImYourBoyRoy/

Host Profile Operator CLI

Host-learning now has an explicit operator CLI so you can inspect, diff, and manage learned routing without digging through JSON manually.

web-scraper-hosts --path ./host_profiles.json summary
web-scraper-hosts --path ./host_profiles.json inspect zoominfo.com
web-scraper-hosts --path ./host_profiles.json diff zoominfo.com
web-scraper-hosts --path ./host_profiles.json promote zoominfo.com
web-scraper-hosts --path ./host_profiles.json demote zoominfo.com
web-scraper-hosts --path ./host_profiles.json reset zoominfo.com

JSON output is available for automation:

web-scraper-hosts --path ./host_profiles.json --json inspect zoominfo.com

This keeps host-learning mutations explicit:

• inspect / diff / summary are read-only
• promote / demote / reset mutate the store intentionally