CLI reference

The crawlie binary is agent-friendly: it defaults to clean JSON on stdout, supports pretty/CSV/HTML output, and sets exit codes for CI gating.

crawl

Crawl and audit a whole site from a seed URL.

crawlie crawl https://example.com --format pretty

Flag	Description
--max-pages <n>	Max pages to crawl (default 500).
--max-depth <n>	Max link depth (default 16).
-c, --concurrency <n>	Concurrent requests (default 16).
--timeout <secs>	Per-request timeout (default 15).
--no-external	Skip HEAD-checking external/uncrawled links.
--no-robots	Ignore robots.txt.
--no-sitemap	Don’t seed the crawl from sitemap.xml.
--include <glob>	Only crawl URLs matching this glob (repeatable).
--exclude <glob>	Skip URLs matching this glob (repeatable).
--format <fmt>	json (default), pretty, csv, or html.
--severity <sev>	Only show findings at/above a severity.
-o, --output <file>	Write to a file instead of stdout.
--save	Save to local report history.
--fail-on <sev>	Exit non-zero on error or warning findings (for CI).
-q, --quiet	Suppress progress output.

# Shareable, self-contained HTML report
crawlie crawl https://example.com --format html -o report.html

# Clean JSON for piping / scripting / agents
crawlie crawl https://example.com --format json -o report.json

# Only a section of the site
crawlie crawl https://example.com --include '/blog/**'

audit

Audit one or more explicit URLs (no crawling).

crawlie audit https://example.com/pricing https://example.com/signup

Supports --format, -o/--output, and -q/--quiet.

explain

Print plain-English guidance for any rule — why it matters, how to fix it, and what happens if you ignore it.

crawlie explain geo-not-answerable
crawlie explain redirect-chain

See the full list in What it checks.

reports

crawls saved with --save go to a local report store.

crawlie reports               # list saved reports
crawlie report <id>           # print a saved report
crawlie report <id> --delete  # remove it

CI gating

--fail-on turns crawlie into a quality gate. A non-zero exit fails the job.

crawlie crawl https://staging.example.com --fail-on error --quiet

See CI & automation for a ready-to-paste workflow.