acrawl

[acrawl]

Browser automation agent that acts and observes. Navigate, click, and extract — or inspect network traffic, debug console errors, profile performance, and audit accessibility. One Rust binary.

[CI] [License: MIT] [Rust] [Website]

Website · Docs · Install · Quick start · MCP server · Comparisons

Single Rust binary. Full DevTools observability. 43 tools. 25 LLM providers. MCP server built-in.

[acrawl architecture: the TUI, one-shot prompt, and MCP entry points feed a runtime turn loop that streams from an LLM provider and runs 43 tools, which fetch over HTTP, escalate to CloakBrowser, or drive the user's Chrome through a WebSocket extension bridge.]

acrawl > get the name, price and rating of every book on books.toscrape.com, all 50 pages

acrawl reads the goal, opens the site, works out the pagination and hands back JSON. Along the way the agent can watch the network, read the console, profile performance and audit accessibility, so it can debug a page as well as scrape it. It also runs as an MCP server, so Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and 14 other clients can drive the same browser.

Install

Linux / macOS (x64, ARM64)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Mingye-Lu/AgenticCrawler/main/install.sh | bash

Windows (x64, PowerShell)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Mingye-Lu/AgenticCrawler/main/install.ps1 | iex

The script downloads the latest release, verifies its SHA256 checksum and sets up CloakBrowser, the stealth browser acrawl uses for JavaScript-heavy pages. Browser features need Node.js 20+. To build from source, see the install guide.

Quick start

acrawl auth anthropic          # or openai, google, other (Ollama, LM Studio, ...), 25 providers in allacrawl                         # interactive terminal UIacrawl prompt "list the titles of the top 10 stories on news.ycombinator.com"   # one goal, then exit

Then go further:

acrawl mcp install                     # add acrawl to Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and other MCP clientsacrawl run books_catalog -o books.json # replay a saved script with no LLM calls

The quick start walks through a first crawl, getting JSON out, and writing goals that work.

What you can do with it

Extract data from any site. Describe the fields you want; acrawl fetches static pages over HTTP and switches to a real browser only when a page needs JavaScript.

acrawl > get all repository names and star counts from github.com/trending

Debug a page like a developer would. Network requests, console logs, WebSocket frames, performance timings, cookies, storage, code coverage and axe-core accessibility audits are all agent tools.

acrawl > open localhost:3000/checkout, submit the form, and tell me which requests failed and why

Fill forms and work through flows. Click, type, select, hover, press keys and emulate phones. With the acrawl Bridge extension, it works inside your own logged-in Chrome, Edge or Brave.

Run it again for free. Save a crawl as a deterministic JSON script with loops, conditions and parallel branches, then replay it from cron or CI with acrawl run, with no model calls.

Split big jobs. The agent forks sub-agents onto separate tabs, and a URL-claiming registry stops two of them from crawling the same page.

Why acrawl

• One binary. No Python environment, no Docker, no hosted service. Node.js is needed only for the bundled browser.
• Acts and observes. Most browser agents navigate and click. acrawl's agent also sees the network, the console and performance, as first-class tools.
• AI where you need it, scripts where you don't. Let the agent explore once; replay the result deterministically.
• Your choice of model. 25 providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, Bedrock, Azure, Vertex AI, GitHub Copilot, Groq, Mistral and OpenRouter, plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as Ollama.
• MCP both ways. Use other MCP servers as extra agent tools, or expose acrawl's 40 tools to your coding agent with acrawl mcp.
• Open source. MIT-licensed, runs on your machine, with your own LLM key and no telemetry.

Bring your own model

Use it from your coding agent

acrawl mcp install sets acrawl up as an MCP server in any of these clients.

How it compares

Reviewed October 2026. The full comparison has a page for each tool.

Documentation

Everything else lives on the website, mingye-lu.github.io/AgenticCrawler.

Driving acrawl from a coding agent? npx skills add Mingye-Lu/AgenticCrawler installs the acrawl-mcp skill, which teaches the agent when to use direct tools, scripts or run_goal.

Development

acrawl is a Rust workspace of 11 crates.

cargo build --releasecargo test --workspacecargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warningscargo fmt --check

See CONTRIBUTING.md to get started, CHANGELOG.md for release notes and SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability.

License

MIT