Tavily Crawl

Crawl any website and save pages as local markdown files. Ideal for downloading documentation, knowledge bases, or web content for offline access or analysis.

Crawl websites to extract content from multiple pages. Ideal for documentation, knowledge bases, and site-wide content extraction.

Authentication

Get your API key at https://tavily.com and add to your OpenClaw config:

{
  "skills": {
    "entries": {
      "tavily-crawl": {
        "enabled": true,
        "apiKey": "tvly-YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or set in environment variable:

export TAVILY_API_KEY="tvly-YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"

Quick Start

Using the Script

node {baseDir}/scripts/crawl.mjs "https://docs.example.com"
node {baseDir}/scripts/crawl.mjs "https://docs.example.com" --output ./docs
node {baseDir}/scripts/crawl.mjs "https://example.com" --depth 2 --limit 50

Examples

# Basic crawl
node {baseDir}/scripts/crawl.mjs "https://docs.example.com"

# Deeper crawl with limits
node {baseDir}/scripts/crawl.mjs "https://docs.example.com" --depth 2 --limit 50

# Save to files
node {baseDir}/scripts/crawl.mjs "https://docs.example.com" --depth 2 --output ./docs

# Focused crawl with path filters
node {baseDir}/scripts/crawl.mjs "https://example.com" --depth 2 \
  --select "/docs/.*" --exclude "/blog/.*"

# With semantic instructions
node {baseDir}/scripts/crawl.mjs "https://docs.example.com" \
  --instructions "Find API documentation" --chunks 3

Options

Option	Description	Default
--depth <n>	Crawl depth (1-5)	1
--breadth <n>	Links per page	20
--limit <n>	Total pages cap	50
--output <dir>	Save pages to directory	-
--instructions <text>	Natural language guidance	-
--chunks <n>	Chunks per page (1-5, requires instructions)	-
--depth-mode <mode>	Extract depth: basic or advanced	basic
--select <pattern>	Regex pattern to include	-
--exclude <pattern>	Regex pattern to exclude	-
--timeout <sec>	Max wait time (10-150 seconds)	150
--json	Output raw JSON	false

Depth vs Performance

Depth	Typical Pages	Time
1	10-50	Seconds
2	50-500	Minutes
3	500-5000	Many minutes

Start with --depth 1 and increase only if needed.

Crawl for Context vs Data Collection

For agentic use (feeding results into context): Always use --instructions + --chunks. This returns only relevant chunks instead of full pages, preventing context window explosion.

For data collection (saving to files): Omit --chunks to get full page content.

Tips

• Always use --chunks for agentic workflows - prevents context explosion when feeding results to LLMs
• Omit --chunks only for data collection - when saving full pages to files
• Start conservative (--depth 1, --limit 20) and scale up
• Use path patterns to focus on relevant sections
• Always set a --limit to prevent runaway crawls