Headless Brave Browser

Headless web search and content extraction via the Brave Search API. Features exponential-backoff retry, circuit breaker fault isolation, bounded-concurrency parallel page fetching, structured leveled logging, and smart paragraph-boundary truncation. No browser required. Use for web research, documentation lookup, URL content extraction, and any workflow requiring scriptable, non-interactive web search.

brave-search

Headless web search and content extraction via the Brave Search API.

Setup

Run once before first use:

bash

cd <skill-root>
npm ci

Required environment variable:

bash

export BRAVE_API_KEY="your-key-here"

Get a free API key at brave.com/search/api.

Usage

Search

bash

node scripts/search.js "query"                        # Basic (5 results)
node scripts/search.js "query" -n 10                  # Up to 20 results
node scripts/search.js "query" --content              # Include page content
node scripts/search.js "query" -n 3 --content         # Combined
node scripts/search.js "query" --json                 # Newline-delimited JSON
node scripts/search.js --help                         # Full options + env vars

Extract page content

bash

node scripts/content.js https://example.com/article
node scripts/content.js https://example.com/article --json
node scripts/content.js https://example.com/article --max-length 8000

Output format (plain text)

text

--- Result 1 ---
Title:   Page Title
URL:     https://example.com/page
Snippet: Description from Brave Search
Content:
  # Page Title

  Extracted markdown content...

--- Result 2 ---
...

Pass --json to get one JSON object per line instead, suitable for piping.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success
1	Invalid input or configuration error
2	Page had no extractable content (content.js)
130	Interrupted (SIGINT)

Configuration (environment variables)

All behaviour is configurable without touching code:

Variable	Default	Description
BRAVE_API_KEY	—	Required. Brave Search subscription token
LOG_LEVEL	info	debug · info · warn · error · silent
LOG_JSON	false	Emit logs as newline-delimited JSON to stderr
FETCH_TIMEOUT_MS	15000	Per-page fetch timeout
SEARCH_TIMEOUT_MS	10000	Brave API call timeout
MAX_CONTENT_LENGTH	5000	Max chars of extracted content
MAX_RETRY_ATTEMPTS	3	Retry attempts on transient errors
RETRY_BASE_DELAY_MS	500	Base delay for exponential backoff
RETRY_MAX_DELAY_MS	30000	Backoff delay cap
CONCURRENCY_LIMIT	3	Parallel page fetches when --content is set
CB_FAILURE_THRESHOLD	5	Consecutive failures before circuit opens
CB_RESET_TIMEOUT_MS	60000	Circuit breaker reset window

All variables are validated at startup — misconfigured runs fail immediately with a descriptive list of every bad value rather than crashing mid-execution.

Architecture

See references/ARCHITECTURE.md for a full module breakdown.

text

scripts/
├── search.js            ← Search CLI entry point
├── content.js           ← Content extraction CLI entry point
├── content-fetcher.js   ← HTTP fetch + Readability + DOM fallback
├── config.js            ← Schema-validated env config
├── circuit-breaker.js   ← Fault isolation (CLOSED → OPEN → HALF_OPEN)
├── retry.js             ← Exponential backoff with full jitter
├── concurrency.js       ← Bounded parallel execution pool
├── utils.js             ← htmlToMarkdown, smartTruncate, parseURL
├── logger.js            ← Structured leveled logger → stderr
└── errors.js            ← Typed error hierarchy