scrape

Bright Data — Scrape

Get clean content (markdown, HTML, JSON, screenshot) from one or more URLs via the Bright Data CLI. This skill owns the "fetch raw or lightly-structured content" job. For platform-specific structured data (Amazon, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.), stop and use data-feeds instead — you'll get clean JSON without selector logic.

Setup gate (run first)

Before any scrape, verify the CLI is installed and authenticated:

if ! command -v bdata >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "bdata CLI not installed — see bright-data-best-practices/references/cli-setup.md"
elif ! bdata zones >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "bdata not authenticated — run: bdata login  (or: bdata login --device for SSH)"
fi

If either check fails, halt and route the user to skills/bright-data-best-practices/references/cli-setup.md. Do not attempt the legacy curl fallback silently — ask the user first.

Pick your path

Situation	Action
Single URL	bdata scrape <url> -f markdown
Small list (≤ ~20 URLs)	shell loop, 1 at a time (see references/patterns.md)
Larger list (dozens+)	xargs -P 4 with parallelism cap (see references/patterns.md)
Paginated listing	scrape page 1 → extract next-page URL → append → repeat (see references/examples.md)
JS-heavy / login-gated / interaction-required	escalate to bdata browser (see brightdata-cli skill)
Amazon, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, …	stop — hand off to data-feeds
No URL yet, just a topic	hand off to search

Action

Core commands:

# Clean markdown (default)
bdata scrape "https://example.com/article" -f markdown -o article.md

# Raw HTML (when you need the DOM)
bdata scrape "https://example.com" -f html -o page.html

# Structured JSON (when the Unlocker returns parsed fields)
bdata scrape "https://example.com" -f json --pretty -o page.json

# Visual snapshot (saves PNG)
bdata scrape "https://example.com" -f screenshot -o page.png

# Geo-targeted (override the exit country)
bdata scrape "https://example.com" --country de -f markdown

Full flag reference: references/flags.md.

Verification gate (run before claiming success)

1. Non-empty output: test -s "$out_path" — or, for stdout, at least 200 bytes of content.
2. Not a block page — grep the output for any of these signatures (case-insensitive):
   • Access Denied
   • Just a moment
   • Attention Required
   • Checking your browser
   • captcha
   • cf-browser-verification
   • cloudflare (with < 2KB total body)
3. Expected markers present for the task: e.g., a product page should contain a price pattern (\$\d); an article should contain at least one <h1> or # heading.
4. On failure, escalation ladder:
   • Retry with a different --country (e.g., --country de if the origin site is US)
   • Escalate to bdata browser for full JS rendering (hand off to brightdata-cli skill)

Do not report success until all checks above pass.

Red flags

• Claiming success without inspecting the output.
• Silencing errors with 2>/dev/null — you'll miss auth failures and rate-limit errors.
• Running bdata scrape on Amazon/LinkedIn/TikTok/Instagram/YouTube/Reddit URLs — these are supported by data-feeds and return structured data directly. Scraping loses the structure.
• Scraping the same URL repeatedly in the same task — cache the first result.
• Looping bdata scrape sequentially for large lists instead of using xargs -P 4 (or similar) with a parallelism cap.
• Using curl against api.brightdata.com directly — legacy path; only when the CLI isn't available.

References

• references/flags.md — every flag with when-to-use notes.
• references/patterns.md — shell-loop batching, xargs parallelism, pagination recipe, retry/backoff, block-page recovery chain, legacy curl fallback.
• references/examples.md — (1) single page → markdown, (2) batch a list of URLs with parallelism cap, (3) paginated listing, (4) block-page recovery.