Karakeep

Karakeep

Karakeep is an open source bookmark manager for collecting, organizing, and searching links, notes, images, and PDFs. Use this skill to operate a Karakeep instance through the official CLI.

When to use

Use this skill when the user asks to add, retrieve, search, organize, export, or otherwise manage content in Karakeep.

Prefer the CLI over writing direct HTTP requests. Run karakeep --help or karakeep <command> --help when a command is not covered here. karakeep skill prints the skill bundled with the installed CLI, which may be newer than a separately installed copy.

Core concepts

Karakeep stores three bookmark types:

• Links. Karakeep can fetch the page title, description, image, screenshot, readable content, and full-page archive.
• Text. Notes and text snippets stored as bookmarks.
• Assets. Images and PDFs uploaded as bookmarks.

Bookmarks can have tags, notes, highlights, favorite and archive state, and membership in one or more lists. Manual lists contain selected bookmarks. Smart lists use a saved search query and update as matching bookmarks change.

Saving a link that already exists does not create a duplicate. For ordinary saves, including the CLI, Karakeep restores the existing bookmark from the archive and moves it to the top. Metadata that the caller did not supply remains unchanged.

Karakeep can consume RSS feeds and publish lists as RSS feeds. Its rule engine can tag, favorite, or route new bookmarks to lists. Webhooks report bookmark events.

Search query language

Spaces between conditions mean and. Use and, or, and parentheses for explicit boolean logic. Prefix a qualifier with - or ! to negate it. Text that is not part of a qualifier becomes the search text.

Valid capture sources are api, web, cli, mobile, extension, singlefile, rss, and import.

Examples:

is:fav after:2026-01-01 #important
is:archived and (list:reading or #work)
-is:tagged or -is:inlist
machine learning is:fav -is:archived

Install the CLI

npm install -g @karakeep/cli

The container image is also available:

docker run --rm ghcr.io/karakeep-app/karakeep-cli:release --help

Authenticate

Create an API key in the Karakeep settings page. The simplest persistent setup is:

karakeep auth init
karakeep whoami

auth init prompts for the server address and API key. It writes a mode 0600 JSON file to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/karakeep/config.json, or ~/.config/karakeep/config.json when XDG_CONFIG_HOME is unset. It asks before changing an existing file. Use --force to overwrite it without confirmation.

For non-interactive setup, put the global options before auth init:

karakeep --server-addr "https://karakeep.example.com" --api-key "$KARAKEEP_API_KEY" auth init --force

The CLI resolves credentials in this order:

1. Global command options, --api-key and --server-addr.
2. KARAKEEP_API_KEY and KARAKEEP_SERVER_ADDR environment variables.
3. The persistent config file.

The server address defaults to https://cloud.karakeep.app. The API key has no default. Use global options for a one-off command without changing saved config:

karakeep --api-key <key> --server-addr <addr> whoami

Add and import bookmarks

# Add one or more links. Repeat --link for multiple URLs.
karakeep bookmarks add --link "https://example.com"

# Add tags and list membership while saving.
karakeep bookmarks add --link "https://example.com" --tag-name reading --tag-name work --list-id <list-id>

# Add text directly or from stdin.
karakeep bookmarks add --note "Review the proposal" --title "Reminder"
printf '%s\n' "Long note" | karakeep bookmarks add --stdin

# Upload an image or PDF as an asset bookmark.
karakeep bookmarks add --asset ./paper.pdf --title "Research paper"

Import a SingleFile HTML archive with its original URL:

karakeep bookmarks import-singlefile ./page.html --url "https://example.com/page"
karakeep bookmarks import-singlefile ./page.html --url "https://example.com/page" --if-exists overwrite-recrawl

--if-exists accepts skip, overwrite, overwrite-recrawl, append, or append-recrawl. The default is skip. The recrawl variants queue a crawl after storing the archive.

Find bookmarks

bookmarks search supports three modes:

• fts is the default full-text search.
• semantic searches bookmark embeddings. It requires non-empty search text and configured embedding and vector-store providers. Results below the similarity threshold are omitted, so it may return fewer than the requested limit.
• hybrid combines full-text and semantic rankings. It falls back to full-text search when the query contains only qualifiers or semantic infrastructure is unavailable.

Semantic and hybrid searches support relevance sorting only when semantic ranking runs. The instance must also enable semantic search and automatic embedding indexing.

# Full-text search with qualifiers.
karakeep bookmarks search "rust is:fav" --limit 10

# Find conceptually related content even when wording differs.
karakeep bookmarks search "durable background jobs" --search-mode semantic

# Combine keyword and semantic ranking.
karakeep bookmarks search "rust async patterns #programming" --search-mode hybrid

# Include stored content and fetch every result page.
karakeep bookmarks search "incident review" --include-content --all

Use bookmarks list for structured filters that do not need the search language:

karakeep bookmarks list --list-id <list-id> --include-archived
karakeep bookmarks list --tag-id <tag-id> --all

Without --all, list and search commands print a cursor when another page exists. Pass it back with --cursor <cursor>.

Read content and download assets

Get bookmark metadata with bookmarks get. --include-content includes stored content in the result.

karakeep bookmarks get <bookmark-id>
karakeep bookmarks get <bookmark-id> --include-content

For long content, use the bounded readable-content command. It returns Markdown or plain text and prints a continuation cursor when more content remains.

karakeep bookmarks content <bookmark-id> --format markdown --max-chars 20000
karakeep bookmarks content <bookmark-id> --cursor <cursor>

The maximum chunk size is 50,000 Unicode characters. Download an attachment or asset by the asset ID shown by bookmarks get:

karakeep assets download <asset-id> --output ./download.pdf
karakeep assets download <asset-id> --output ./download.pdf --force

Update and organize bookmarks

karakeep bookmarks update <bookmark-id> --title "New title" --description "New description"
karakeep bookmarks update <bookmark-id> --archive
karakeep bookmarks update <bookmark-id> --no-archive
karakeep bookmarks update <bookmark-id> --favourite
karakeep bookmarks update-tags <bookmark-id> --add-tag important --remove-tag inbox

karakeep lists list
karakeep lists create --name "Reading" --icon "📚"
karakeep lists create --name "Recent AI" --icon "🤖" --type smart --query "#ai age:<1m"
karakeep lists get <list-id>
karakeep lists add-bookmark --list <list-id> --bookmark <bookmark-id>
karakeep lists remove-bookmark --list <list-id> --bookmark <bookmark-id>

karakeep tags list
karakeep tags get --name important
karakeep tags merge --into <target-tag-id> --from <tag-id> <tag-id>

karakeep highlights list --bookmark <bookmark-id>
karakeep highlights get <highlight-id>

Delete commands are available for bookmarks, lists, tags, and highlights. Confirm the target with the user before using them.

Machine-readable output

Use the global --json option when another program or agent will consume the result. Put it before the command to avoid ambiguity:

karakeep --json bookmarks search "#work" --all
karakeep --json whoami