Docs Crawler

docs-crawler

Crawl a documentation website into a single Markdown corpus that an LLM can consume as context.

When to use

The user wants to capture a multi-page documentation, design-system, or reference site as Markdown — to feed an LLM, archive it, or research a design system. This skill is also invoked by the design-md skill's research phase.

Inputs

• Site URL (required) — the documentation site, e.g. https://socarframe.socar.kr/. Any page on the site works; page discovery starts from the site's sitemap.xml.
• Output directory (optional) — where to write the corpus. Defaults to ./{host}-docs/ in the current working directory.

If the user has not provided a URL, ask for one — do not guess.

Running the crawl

From the repository root:

pnpm crawl:docs <site-url> [--out <dir>] [--external-images]

Equivalent direct form:

pnpm exec tsx .claude/skills/docs-crawler/scripts/crawl.ts <site-url> [--out <dir>]

The engine discovers pages via sitemap.xml (falling back to same-origin link-following), fetches each page, extracts the main content, and converts it to Markdown. It prints per-page progress and a final summary line.

By default it also localizes images: every external image and inline base64 data: image is downloaded into crawl/images/ and the Markdown is rewritten to relative paths, so the corpus is self-contained for renderers that can't fetch external URLs (Claude Design, offline previews). Pass --external-images to skip downloading and keep the original external URLs instead.

Output

These artifacts are written under the output directory:

• crawl-corpus.md — every successful page merged into one document, with a table of contents and a Source: URL per page. This is the primary deliverable.
• crawl/pages/{NNN}-{slug}.md — one file per page, each with source_url / title / method frontmatter.
• crawl/images/ — downloaded image files (skipped with --external-images), referenced from the corpus and page files by relative paths.
• crawl/manifest.json — a per-URL audit log (status, fetch method, extracted character count, error reason).

After crawling

Report back to the user:

• How many pages succeeded versus failed (from the summary line or crawl/manifest.json).
• The path to crawl-corpus.md.
• If any pages failed, list them from the manifest with the reason (e.g. disallowed by robots.txt, no extractable content).

Do not paste the whole corpus into the conversation — point the user at the file. The corpus can be large.

Output location and the design-md skill

The --out argument controls where everything is written. When the design-md skill calls this crawler during its research phase, it passes --out pointing at its cache directory (.claude/cache/design-md/{slug}/), so the resulting crawl-corpus.md (and the localized crawl/images/) land where research-collector can read and cite them. The whole cache directory is gitignored, so downloaded images stay out of version control. Nothing special is needed for that case — just run the crawl with the given --out.

Notes and edge cases

• No sitemap — discovery automatically falls back to following same-origin links from the start URL.
• JavaScript-rendered sites — if a page returns an empty shell, the engine re-fetches it through a headless browser. Chromium is installed automatically on first need (~150 MB, one-time). Static sites never launch a browser.
• Images are downloaded into crawl/images/ by default and referenced by relative paths, so the corpus is self-contained — this covers external <img> URLs and inline base64 data: images alike. A non-base64 (percent-encoded) data: URI, or any image whose bytes fail to download or decode, instead becomes an inline-image-omitted placeholder (alt and title text are kept) so raw base64 never bloats the corpus. With --external-images the crawler downloads nothing: external URLs stay as-is and inline data: images collapse to the placeholder.
• Few or no images is normal, especially for design-system sites — modern docs and design-system sites (Docusaurus and similar) render icons and component visuals as inline <svg>, CSS, or live DOM rather than <img> files; any real <img> (e.g. a navbar logo) is usually site chrome the content extractor correctly drops. An image-light or image-free corpus is expected in that case — it is not a crawl failure. Capture visuals separately (screenshots) if the research needs them.
• robots.txt is respected; disallowed paths are skipped.
• Page cap — at most 200 pages per crawl.
• Zero pages crawled — the engine exits non-zero and prints the reason (bad URL, blocked, or an empty site). Surface that to the user rather than reporting success.