@bitcraft-apps/pi-web-tools

Shell-only web search and fetch tools for pi.dev. Zero API keys, zero accounts — just ddgr + pandoc/w3m running locally.

Tools

websearch

DuckDuckGo search via ddgr. Returns up to 25 results with title, URL, snippet.

webfetch

fetch + optional content-extraction pre-pass + HTML→markdown via pandoc (preferred) or w3m (fallback). Auto-handles Cloudflare challenges via UA hack. Blocks SSRF (localhost/RFC1918). Optional add-ons: a Reader-View extractor for chrome-heavy pages (docs/extraction.md) and pdftotext for PDFs (docs/pdf.md).

Install

# 1. System deps (one-time)
brew install ddgr pandoc        # macOS
# or: pip install ddgr; apt install pandoc w3m

# Optional add-ons (recommended):
#   pipx install trafilatura     # Reader-View extraction — see docs/extraction.md
#   brew install poppler         # PDF support — see docs/pdf.md

# 2. Extension (from npm)
pi install npm:@bitcraft-apps/pi-web-tools

# Or pin a specific version:
# pi install npm:@bitcraft-apps/pi-web-tools@<version>

# Or for local dev / hacking on the source:
pi install -e /path/to/pi-web-tools

After install, restart pi and the websearch and webfetch tools become available.

Usage examples

In a pi session:

> Find me docs for Bun's native Sqlite API
[agent uses websearch → gets bun.sh URL → uses webfetch → reads docs]

You don't call them directly — pi's agent calls them when it needs.

Limits and behavior

• websearch: default 8 results, hard cap 25. DuckDuckGo rate-limits ~10 req/min/IP. If you hit it, wait or use webfetch directly.
  • region (optional): DuckDuckGo region code, e.g. pl-pl, us-en, de-de. Maps to ddgr's --reg. Default: ddgr's built-in (us-en).
  • safesearch (optional): off | moderate | strict. Default moderate. off passes --unsafe to ddgr. ddgr does not distinguish moderate vs strict — both use its default safe-search behavior (see ddgr.1 manpage; only --unsafe is exposed).
  • time (optional): d | w | m | y — restrict results to the past day/week/month/year. Maps to ddgr's --time. Default: no filter (all time). Use when the query is time-sensitive ("latest", "recent", "this week") — DuckDuckGo's default ranking otherwise surfaces years-old SEO content above recent results.
• webfetch: default 50k chars output, hard cap 200k; 5 MB response cap; 30s timeout.
• webfetch sends Accept: text/markdown,text/html;q=0.9,… first; sites that honor it (Cloudflare's "Markdown for Agents", GitHub docs, Anthropic docs, Stripe API docs, …) return pre-rendered markdown — typically 10–100× smaller.
• webfetch cannot fetch: images, video, audio, localhost, 127/8, 169.254/16; PDFs unless optional pdftotext is installed (see docs/pdf.md).
• webfetch pagination: pass offset (default 0) to read past the 200k-char per-call cap; thread the Y from the [TRUNCATED — returned chars [X, Y) of Z total. Re-call with offset=Y …] footer back as the next offset. The range is half-open (X inclusive, Y exclusive) so passing Y resumes exactly where the previous chunk stopped, with no overlap or gap. Stop paginating once the section the agent needs is in hand.
• On 429/503, honors Retry-After (delta-seconds or HTTP-date) for one retry, capped at 10s. No backoff, no retry on other statuses.
• Cross-host redirects are surfaced in-band via a [REDIRECTED — input was https://INPUT_HOST, final URL is FINAL_URL] line prepended to the markdown; userinfo (user:pass@) is stripped. Same-host redirects produce no notice.
• Honors the charset= parameter on Content-Type for response decoding (e.g. windows-1250, iso-8859-2, shift_jis, gb2312). Unknown labels fall back to UTF-8.
• For HTML responses without a Content-Type charset, sniffs <meta charset="..."> or <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="...; charset=..."> declared in the first 1024 bytes (HTML comments are stripped first).
• All operations are read-only and synchronous. No persistent state, no cache.

What webfetch does not do

• No JavaScript execution. Pages that render client-side return empty markdown. Workarounds: try the same content via old.reddit.com, *.json API endpoints, RSS/Atom feeds, or the site's documented REST API.
• No per-host routing. webfetch does not switch behavior based on hostname (no if hostname === "github.com" branches). If you want "use gh for GitHub URLs, fall back to webfetch otherwise," that belongs in a personal pi skill in ~/.pi/agent/skills/, not in this package. See AGENTS.md “Bar for new tools” for the full rationale.
• No headless browser. Out of scope per AGENTS.md. Shell-only is the project's design constraint.

Troubleshooting

• ddgr not installed → brew install ddgr or pip install ddgr
• Need pandoc or w3m installed → brew install pandoc
• DuckDuckGo timed out (likely rate-limited) → wait 1–2 min
• Site requires JS, cannot fetch in shell-only mode → site uses Cloudflare/JS-only; not solvable without headless browser, out of scope for this tool

Development

# one-time, if you don't have bun:
#   macOS:        brew install bun
#   Linux / WSL:  curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash
# (or see https://bun.sh for other options)
git clone https://github.com/bitcraft-apps/pi-web-tools
cd pi-web-tools
bun install
bun run typecheck           # type-check via tsgo (@typescript/native-preview); CI runs this before tests
bun run lint                # oxlint + type-aware oxlint-tsgolint; CI runs this before tests
bun run format              # apply oxfmt to src/, test/, index.ts, vitest.config.ts
bun run format:check        # CI runs this before lint; fails if anything is unformatted
bun run test                # unit tests, no network
bun run test:network        # integration tests (requires net)
bash scripts/metrics.sh     # passive health signals (npm + GitHub); on-demand, no state

We use bun as the dev package manager. The committed lockfile is bun.lock; package-lock.json is gitignored.

End-user installs (pi install npm:...) pull a published tarball from the npm registry. The tarball ships only index.ts, src/, README.md, LICENSE, and CHANGELOG.md (no tests, no bun.lock, no CI configs) — see files in package.json. bun.lock is the dev lockfile only; transitive deps for end users are resolved by npm install against the registry at install time. Peer deps are wildcard-pinned, no runtime deps drift in breaking ways.

Hot-reload during dev:

ln -s "$(pwd)" ~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-web-tools
# in pi session: /reload

License

MIT