WebReaper ships two ways: a single native binary for the command line, and a NuGet library for embedding in .NET apps. The CLI needs no runtime, no Docker, and no database. Pick whichever fits your workflow, or use both.

macOS and Linux (Homebrew)

The fastest path on macOS and Linux is the Homebrew tap:

brew install pavlovtech/webreaper/webreaper

Upgrades come through brew upgrade webreaper like any other formula.

Any POSIX shell (install.sh)

The install script detects your OS and architecture, downloads the matching binary from GitHub Releases, and drops it on your PATH:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pavlovtech/WebReaper/master/scripts/install.sh | sh

To update an existing install in place, append the upgrade flag:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pavlovtech/WebReaper/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- --upgrade

Windows

Download the zip for your architecture from the GitHub Releases page, unzip it, and put webreaper.exe somewhere on your PATH. Both win-x64 and win-arm64 builds are published with every release.

.NET library

To embed the scraper in a .NET app, add the package:

dotnet add package WebReaper

That gives you the fluent ScraperEngineBuilder and every in-process seam. Optional capabilities (browser rendering, AI, distributed backends) live in satellite packages such as WebReaper.Playwright, WebReaper.AI, and WebReaper.Redis; add only the ones you need.

Builds and platforms

The CLI is compiled with Native AOT into a self-contained single binary, so startup is instant and there is no .NET runtime to install. Builds are published for six runtime identifiers:

linux-x64, linux-arm64
osx-x64, osx-arm64
win-x64, win-arm64

The macOS binaries are codesigned and notarized, so Gatekeeper runs them without the "unidentified developer" prompt.

Staying current

On each run the CLI checks for a newer release and prints a short hint to stderr when one is available. This never blocks the command, and it writes only to stderr, so it never pollutes piped Markdown or JSON on stdout. To silence the check entirely, set an environment variable:

export WEBREAPER_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1

Verify the install

webreaper scrape https://example.com

You should see clean Markdown printed to your terminal. From here, the CLI reference covers every subcommand, and the library quickstart shows the fluent builder.