webcli

webcli is a parse-safe, provider-agnostic CLI designed for autonomous agents.

It gives AI agents structured JSON access to 19 web platforms — including documentation reading, web search, GitHub repos, finance quotes, HuggingFace models, and Docker registries — without requiring browsers, scrapers, or complex API keys.

Agent Integration Guarantees

• stdout is always valid JSON, never mixed with logs
• stderr is diagnostic only and safe to discard
• batch commands preserve input order exactly
• partial failures are item-local — one bad URL or symbol never fails the batch
• count always equals the number of returned items
• composed commands (--read-top) colocate nested results on each item
• exit code 0 on structured errors, 1 on command execution failure

Installation

npm install -g browseless

(Development/Local install): npm install -g .

Quick Start

Check dependencies and platform availability:

webcli doctor

Read any webpage as clean markdown:

webcli read https://example.com

Universal web search:

webcli search "react memory leaks"

Core Commands

search

Search the web across multiple providers (DuckDuckGo, Brave, Tavily) with built-in pacing.

$ webcli search "react memory leaks" --limit 3 --read-top 1
{
  "source": "search",
  "command": "search",
  "count": 3,
  "ok": true,
  "mode": "search+read",
  "engine": "ddg",
  "query": "react memory leaks",
  "results": [
    {
      "title": "How to Fix Memory Leaks in React Applications",
      "url": "https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/fix-memory-leaks-in-react-apps/",
      "snippet": "",
      "source": "duckduckgo",
      "rank": 1,
      "read": {
        "ok": true,
        "url": "https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/fix-memory-leaks-in-react-apps/",
        "content": "Title: How to Fix Memory Leaks in React Applications...",
        "provider": "jina",
        "error": null
      }
    }
  ],
  "fetched_at": "2026-04-10T18:29:15.721Z"
}

finance

Get live or delayed price quotes and market caps.

$ webcli finance quote BTC ETH --asset-type crypto
{
  "source": "finance",
  "command": "quote_batch",
  "count": 2,
  "ok": true,
  "asset_type": "crypto",
  "results": [
    {
      "ok": true,
      "type": "quote",
      "symbol": "BTC",
      "name": "Bitcoin",
      "asset_type": "crypto",
      "source": "coingecko",
      "price": {
        "value": 72947,
        "currency": "USD",
        "change": 1039,
        "change_percent": 1.4452
      },
      "fundamentals": {
        "market_cap": 1459933521086
      },
      "market": {
        "delayed": false,
        "as_of": "2026-04-10T18:28:58.053Z"
      }
    }
  ],
  "fetched_at": "2026-04-10T18:29:18.154Z"
}

(Also available: AAPL MSFT --asset-type equity)

huggingface (hf)

Discover capabilities and metadata for ML models and datasets.

$ webcli hf model sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2
{
  "source": "huggingface",
  "command": "model",
  "ok": true,
  "results": {
    "type": "model",
    "id": "sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2",
    "source": "huggingface",
    "card": {
      "author": "sentence-transformers",
      "pipeline_tag": "sentence-similarity",
      "downloads": 194504137,
      "tags": ["sentence-transformers", "pytorch", "bert"]
    },
    "readme_excerpt": "# all-MiniLM-L6-v2 This is a sentence-transformers model..."
  }
}

docker

Identify metadata and available tags for Docker Hub containers.

$ webcli docker tags nginx --limit 3
{
  "source": "docker",
  "command": "tags",
  "ok": true,
  "results": {
    "type": "tags",
    "image": "nginx",
    "source": "dockerhub",
    "count": 3,
    "tags": [
      {
        "name": "mainline-alpine3.23",
        "size": 25988064,
        "architectures": ["amd64", "arm", "arm64"]
      }
    ]
  }
}

doctor

View current CLI installation bounds dynamically and verify which systems have auth correctly mapped.

webcli doctor

Composition & Batch

Webcli exposes deep composition pipelines. You can pass arrays of images directly inside a single command to exploit built-in concurrency tracking:

webcli docker image nginx python redis
webcli finance quote AAPL MSFT NVDA --asset-type equity

Or you can compose entirely decoupled pipelines like search-to-read seamlessly:

webcli search "react memory leaks" --read-top 3

Environment Variables

Variable	Description
BRAVE_API_KEY	Overrides generic searches leveraging Brave Search APIs securely
TAVILY_API_KEY	Switches core capabilities to Tavily dynamic results securely
--delay <ms>	Modifies underlying DDG delay (default 1500) preventing 429 backoff faults

Operational Notes

• Caching: read pipelines enforce generic ETags dynamically.
• Finance Limits: Yahoo Equity results may carry a 15-minute delay during live hours.
• Bounded Concurrency: All batch lists are internally bottlenecked via p-limit(5). Submitting large arrays is safe and will not crash the socket pipeline.
• fetchText Parallel Stalls: Internal fetch layers backoff up to 3 times per domain. With exponential multipliers, a dead URL could hold a parallel slot for up to ~7 seconds, creating minor pipeline stalling for agents executing massive batch arrays.
• Failures: If one URL inside read batch fails (404), the item marks ok: false explicitly while leaving the batch envelope ok: true.

Contracts

View all hard schemas, bounded conditions, and strict parsing mappings comprehensively at docs/contracts.md.