web2md

A powerful, intelligent CLI tool to crawl dynamic and static websites with full JavaScript rendering support and convert them to clean, well-formatted Markdown files. Perfect for archiving documentation, creating offline knowledge bases, and preserving web content.

✨ Key Features

• 🚀 Dynamic Site Support: Full JavaScript rendering via Playwright (Vue/React/Angular/Next.js)
• 🎯 Smart Content Extraction: Automatically identifies and extracts core content, removing navigation, ads, and sidebars
• 🔗 Recursive Crawling: Intelligently crawls subpages with configurable depth and count limits
• �️ Media Downloads: Optional image and video downloading with lazy-loading support
• 📐 Base URL Intelligence: Uses browser's document.baseURI for accurate relative path resolution
• 🔄 Local Link Conversion: Automatically converts HTML links to local Markdown relative paths
• 🧹 Clean Output: Preserves tables, code blocks, images, links, and heading hierarchies
• 🔒 SSL Flexibility: Handles sites with certificate issues gracefully
• 🌍 Cross-Platform: Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux (Python 3.8+)
• 📋 Universal Compatibility: Generated Markdown works with Typora, Obsidian, VS Code, and more

📦 Installation

Option 1: Install from PyPI (Recommended)

pip3 install web2md

Option 2: Install from Source (For Development)

git clone https://github.com/floatinghotpot/web2md.git
cd web2md
python3 -m pip install -e .

Required: Install Playwright Browser

# Install Chromium driver (required for JavaScript rendering)
python3 -m playwright install chromium

# Linux only: Install system dependencies
python3 -m playwright install-deps chromium

🚀 Quick Start

Basic Usage

# Crawl a single page (auto-generated save directory)
web2md https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/

# Specify custom save directory
web2md https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/ ./python-docs

# Crawl with images
web2md https://example.com/docs --picture

# Limit crawl depth and count
web2md https://example.com/docs --depth 2 --count 10

# Crawl with images and videos
web2md https://example.com/docs --picture --video --depth 3

Show Help

web2md -h

📖 Usage

Command Syntax

web2md [URL] [SAVE_DIR] [OPTIONS]

Arguments

Options

Examples

1. Unlimited Crawl with Depth Limit

web2md https://company.com/docs/home company-docs --depth 2

• Crawls all pages within 2 levels of /docs/
• Saves to ./company-docs/

2. Limited Page Count

web2md https://company.com/docs/home company-docs --depth 2 --count 5

• Stops after crawling 5 pages
• Useful for testing or sampling large sites

3. Crawl with Images

web2md https://company.com/docs/home --picture --count 3

• Downloads images to images/ subdirectory
• Converts image URLs to local relative paths in Markdown

4. Auto-Generated Save Directory

web2md https://company.com/docs/home --depth 1 --count 10

• Auto-creates directory: company_com_docs/

🎯 How It Works

1. Base URL Calculation

The tool automatically determines a base URL from your target URL:

• Target: https://company.com/docs/home → Base: https://company.com/docs/
• All crawling is scoped to pages under this base URL

2. Intelligent Path Resolution

Uses the browser's document.baseURI to correctly resolve relative URLs:

• Handles <base> tags in HTML
• Respects redirects and trailing slashes
• Resolves lazy-loaded images with data-src, srcset, etc.

3. Smart Content Extraction

Automatically identifies core content using priority selectors:

1. <main> tag
2. .article-content or .article_content
3. #main-content
4. .content
5. <article> tag
6. Fallback to <body> (with cleanup)

4. Media Handling

When --picture or --video is enabled:

• Downloads media files to images/ or videos/ subdirectories
• Generates unique filenames with MD5 hash to prevent duplicates
• Converts URLs to local relative paths in Markdown
• Supports lazy-loading attributes: data-src, data-original, srcset

5. Filename Generation

MD filenames are generated from URLs:

• Remove base URL prefix
• Replace / with _
• Filter illegal characters
• Example: https://company.com/docs/api/auth → api_auth.md

⚙️ Configuration

Built-in Settings (in web2md/cli.py)

Playwright Configuration

PLAYWRIGHT_CONFIG = {
    "headless": False,           # Set to True for background crawling
    "timeout": 60000,            # Page load timeout (ms)
    "wait_for_load": "networkidle",  # Wait strategy
    "sleep_after_load": 2,       # Additional wait time (seconds)
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0..." # Custom user agent
}

Media Configuration

MEDIA_CONFIG = {
    "timeout": 30000,            # Media download timeout (ms)
    "image_dir": "images",       # Image save subdirectory
    "video_dir": "videos",       # Video save subdirectory
    "allowed_img_ext": [".jpg", ".jpeg", ".png", ".gif", ".bmp", ".svg", ".webp"],
    "allowed_vid_ext": [".mp4", ".avi", ".mov", ".webm", ".flv", ".mkv"]
}

Content Filtering

REMOVE_TAGS = ["nav", "header", "footer", "aside", "script", "style", "iframe", "sidebar"]

CORE_CONTENT_SELECTORS = [
    ("main", {}),
    ("div", {"class_": "article-content"}),
    ("article", {})
]

Crawl Defaults

DEFAULT_CRAWL_CONFIG = {
    "max_depth": 5,              # Default max depth
    "max_count": 999,            # Default max pages
    "allowed_schemes": ["http", "https"],
    "exclude_patterns": [r"\.pdf$", r"\.zip$", r"\.exe$"]
}

🔧 Advanced Usage

Debug Mode (Show Browser)

Edit web2md/cli.py and set:

PLAYWRIGHT_CONFIG = {
    "headless": False,  # Shows browser window
    ...
}

Custom Content Selectors

Add site-specific selectors to CORE_CONTENT_SELECTORS:

CORE_CONTENT_SELECTORS = [
    ("main", {}),
    ("div", {"class_": "documentation-content"}),  # Custom selector
    ("article", {})
]

Anti-Bot Detection

Install and use playwright-stealth:

pip3 install playwright-stealth

Add to get_dynamic_html() in web2md/cli.py:

from playwright_stealth import stealth_sync

page = context.new_page()
stealth_sync(page)  # Add this line
page.goto(url, ...)

Authentication

Add login logic in get_dynamic_html() before page.goto():

page.goto("https://example.com/login")
page.fill("#username", "your-username")
page.fill("#password", "your-password")
page.click("#login-button")
time.sleep(2)

🐛 Troubleshooting

SSL Certificate Errors

The tool automatically disables SSL verification for downloads. If you encounter issues, check your network/firewall settings.

Timeout Errors

Increase timeout in PLAYWRIGHT_CONFIG:

"timeout": 120000,  # 2 minutes

Missing Content

1. Check if content is in <main> or common content tags
2. Add custom selectors to CORE_CONTENT_SELECTORS
3. Run with headless: False to debug visually

Image Download Failures

• Verify image URLs are accessible
• Check if images require authentication
• Some CDNs may block automated downloads

📋 Dependencies

Automatically installed via pip:

• playwright - Browser automation and JS rendering
• beautifulsoup4 - HTML parsing and manipulation
• lxml - Fast XML/HTML parser
• markdownify - HTML to Markdown conversion
• urllib3 - HTTP client utilities

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please follow these steps:

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Make your changes
4. Run tests (if available)
5. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')
6. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
7. Open a Pull Request

Development Setup

git clone https://github.com/floatinghotpot/web2md.git
cd web2md
python3 -m pip install -e .
python3 -m playwright install chromium

📝 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

🙏 Acknowledgments

• Playwright for powerful browser automation
• BeautifulSoup for HTML parsing
• markdownify for clean Markdown conversion

Made with ❤️ for developers, researchers, and documentation enthusiasts.

If you find this tool useful, please consider giving it a ⭐ on GitHub!