nab

Fetch any URL as clean markdown. Auth-aware. LLM-optimized. Blazing fast.

Quick Install

# Homebrew (macOS/Linux)
brew install MikkoParkkola/tap/nab

# From crates.io
cargo install nab

# Pre-built binary (cargo-binstall)
cargo binstall nab

# From source
git clone https://github.com/MikkoParkkola/nab.git
cd nab && cargo install --path .

Demo

A tweet URL with curl vs nab:

$ curl -s https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1234567890 | wc -c
  634217    # 634KB of HTML, ~150K tokens

$ nab fetch https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1234567890
# @elonmusk - 2025-01-15
#
# This is the tweet text, clean and structured.
#
# Likes: 45.2K | Reposts: 12.1K | Replies: 8.3K
#
# ~200 tokens

25x fewer tokens. Same content. Zero configuration.

Features

• 10 Site Providers - Specialized extractors for Twitter/X, Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub, YouTube, Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and Instagram. API-backed where possible for structured output.
• HTML-to-Markdown - Automatic conversion with boilerplate removal. 25x token savings vs raw HTML.
• PDF Extraction - PDF-to-markdown with heading and table detection (requires pdfium).
• Browser Cookie Auth - Auto-detects your default browser (Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Dia) and injects session cookies. Zero config.
• 1Password Integration - Credential lookup, auto-login with CSRF handling, TOTP/MFA support.
• HTTP/3 (QUIC) - 0-RTT connection resumption, HTTP/2 multiplexing, TLS 1.3.
• Anti-Fingerprinting - Realistic Chrome/Firefox/Safari browser profiles to avoid bot detection.
• Compression - Brotli, Zstd, Gzip, Deflate decompression built in.
• MCP Server - nab-mcp binary for direct integration with Claude Code and other MCP clients.
• Batch Fetching - Parallel URL fetching with connection pooling.

Benchmarks

HTML-to-markdown conversion throughput (via cargo bench):

Arena allocator vs Vec<String> for response buffering:

Run benchmarks yourself: cargo bench

Site Providers

nab detects URLs for these platforms and uses their APIs or structured data instead of scraping HTML:

If no provider matches, nab falls back to standard HTML fetch + markdown conversion.

MCP Server

nab ships a native Rust MCP server (nab-mcp) for integration with Claude Code:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nab": {
      "command": "nab-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Tools: fetch, fetch_batch, submit, login, auth_lookup, fingerprint, validate, benchmark.

Usage

# Basic fetch (auto-cookies, markdown output)
nab fetch https://example.com

# Force specific browser cookies
nab fetch https://github.com/notifications --cookies brave

# With 1Password credentials
nab fetch https://internal.company.com --1password

# Raw HTML output (skip markdown conversion)
nab fetch https://example.com --raw-html

# JSON output format
nab fetch https://api.example.com --format json

# Batch benchmark
nab bench "https://example.com,https://httpbin.org/get" -i 10

# Get OTP code from 1Password
nab otp github.com

# Generate browser fingerprint profiles
nab fingerprint -c 5

Comparison

Install Options

Homebrew (macOS/Linux)

brew tap MikkoParkkola/tap
brew install nab

From crates.io (requires Rust 1.93+)

cargo install nab

Pre-built binary (cargo-binstall)

cargo binstall nab

Or download directly from GitHub Releases:

From source

git clone https://github.com/MikkoParkkola/nab.git
cd nab && cargo install --path .

Library Usage

use nab::AcceleratedClient;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    let client = AcceleratedClient::new()?;
    let html = client.fetch_text("https://example.com").await?;
    println!("Fetched {} bytes", html.len());
    Ok(())
}

Requirements

• Rust 1.93+ (for building from source)
• ffmpeg (optional, for streaming/analyze commands): brew install ffmpeg
• 1Password CLI (optional): Install guide

Responsible Use

This tool includes browser cookie extraction and fingerprint spoofing capabilities. These features are intended for legitimate use cases such as accessing your own authenticated content and automated testing. Use responsibly and only on sites where you have authorization.

License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details.