Grabit

Grabit is a command-line tool that allows you to download web pages, extract their readable content, convert it to Markdown, and save it locally.

It's ideal for archiving articles, blog posts, or any web content you may want to save forever and ever. It works well for feeding web content into LLMs too.

I'm using it to save bookmarks in Obsidian, so you'll see a lot of focus in this area (the YAML front matter, the domain subdirectory, etc.). But it's flexible enough to be used in other contexts as well.

Features

• Download and convert web pages to Markdown: Fetches the content from a URL and converts it into clean Markdown format.
• Supports multiple output formats: Save content as Markdown, readable HTML, or raw HTML.
• Customizable output: Include YAML front matter, page titles, source links, and control the output directory structure. This is especially useful for integrating with knowledge management systems such as Obsidian.
• Uses Readability.js: Extracts the main content from web pages for cleaner outputs (requires Node.js to be installed).

Installation

• Ensure uv is installed
• Ensure Node.js is installed (optional, required for Readability.js, see below for options)
• Download grabit.py to a local folder on your machine, e.g. ~/scripts.

Usage

uv run -q <download-path>/grabit.py [OPTIONS] URL

Options

• --yaml-frontmatter / --no-yaml-frontmatter: Include YAML front matter with metadata, useful for saving & viewing content in Obsidian (default: enabled).
• --include-title / --no-include-title: Include the page title as an H1 heading. A bit redundant when rendering the YAML frontmatter, but I like it anyway (default: enabled).
• --include-source / --no-include-source: Include the page source URL at the top of the document. Also a bit redundant when rendering the YAML frontmatter, but this one I don't like so much (default: disabled).
• --fallback-title TEXT: Fallback title if no title is found. Use {date} for the current date (default: Untitled {date}).
• --use-readability-js / --no-use-readability-js: Use Readability.js for processing pages. Disabling it will result in some processing courtesy of ReadabiliPy, but it doesn't look so great to be honest (requires Node.js, default: enabled).
• --create-domain-subdir / --no-create-domain-subdir: Save the resulting files in a subdirectory named after the domain. Useful when saving a lot of bookmarks in the same Obsidian vault (default: enabled).
• --overwrite / --no-overwrite: Overwrite existing files.(default: disabled).
• -f, --format [md|stdout.md|html|raw.html]: Output format(s) to save the content in. Most useful are md, which saves the content to a Markdown file, and stdout.md which simply outputs the raw content so you can pipe it to something else, like the clipboard or Simon Willison's llm cli. Can be specified multiple times (default: md).

Examples

• Save a web page as Markdown with the default options:

uv run grabit.py https://example.com/article

• Save as both Markdown and readable HTML:

uv run grabit.py -f md -f html https://example.com/article

• Output markdown content to stdout:

uv run -q grabit.py -f stdout.md https://example.com/article

Note the -q flag to suppress uv's output.

• Output markdown content to clipboard (MacOS):

uv run -q grabit.py -f stdout.md https://example.com/article | pbcopy

• Disable YAML front matter and include source URL:

uv run grabit.py --no-yaml-frontmatter --include-source https://example.com/article

• Save files in the working directory, without creating a domain subdirectory:

uv run grabit.py --no-create-domain-subdir https://example.com/article

Requirements

• uv (for running the script)
• Node.js (if using Readability.js)

License

Grabit, a tool for archiving web content, copyright (C) 2025 Vlad Iliescu

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the LICENSE for details.