CrawlForge v4.2.2: New CLI + 3 Tools for Local AI Scraping

Today we are shipping CrawlForge v4.2.2, our biggest release since launch. It brings three new tools, a standalone command-line interface, and a quiet shift in how we think about web scraping for AI: most of it should run locally, on your own machine, without API keys.

This post is the umbrella for everything in 4.2.2. Three deep-dive guides follow in the next nine days.

Table of Contents

• What Shipped


• The New CrawlForge CLI


• Extract With LLM: Local AI Extraction


• Scrape Template: Ten Sites, One Call


• list_ollama_models: Free Model Discovery


• Old Workflow vs v4.2.2 Workflow


• Credit Costs


• How to Upgrade


• What Is Next

What Shipped

v4.2.2 adds four things:

1. 
   @crawlforge/cli -- a standalone command-line tool exposing all 23 CrawlForge tools to your shell. No MCP client required.


2. 
   extract_with_llm -- LLM-powered structured extraction that defaults to local Ollama. No external API key needed.


3. 
   scrape_template -- pre-built scrapers for Amazon, LinkedIn, GitHub, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, npm, Product Hunt, and Twitter/X.


4. 
   list_ollama_models -- a free discovery tool that lists models on your local Ollama instance.

Tool count goes from 20 to 23. The CLI is brand new -- it is not a tool, it is a delivery channel.

+----------------+       +-------------------+       +----------------+

|   Your Shell   | <-->  |  @crawlforge/cli  | <-->  |  CrawlForge    |

|   (cron, CI)   |       |  (JSON in/out)    |       |   API + Tools  |

+----------------+       +-------------------+       +----------------+

                                  ^

                          No MCP handshake.

                          Just HTTPS + stdout.

The New CrawlForge CLI

The CLI is the shortest path from intent to scraped data. You install it once, set an environment variable, and every CrawlForge tool becomes a command:

npm install -g @crawlforge/cli

export CRAWLFORGE_API_KEY="cf_live_your_key_here"



crawlforge scrape https://example.com

crawlforge search "best MCP servers 2026"

crawlforge research "AI agent frameworks" --depth 3

Why does this matter? Because MCP is great for AI agents, but a lot of scraping work is not an AI agent task. It is a cron job. A CI step. A one-off pull from your terminal. For that, you want JSON on stdout that pipes into jq, not a JSON-RPC handshake.

Why have a CLI when MCP already exists?

MCP is optimized for AI agents picking tools dynamically. The CLI is optimized for humans typing commands and scripts piping JSON. Different shapes for different jobs:

All three paths hit the same backend, share the same credit balance, and use the same API key.

Read the .

Scrape Template: Ten Sites, One Call

scrape_template is for the long tail of scraping requests that all look the same: "get me product data from Amazon", "get me a GitHub repo's metadata", "get me the top posts on Hacker News today". You should not need to write CSS selectors for these. We did it once, we maintain it, you call it.

crawlforge template amazon --url "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHX1W1XY"

crawlforge template github --url "https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-sdk-python"

crawlforge template hackernews --top 10

Ten templates ship in this release:

Full walkthrough with code: .

Ready to try the new tools? Free tier still includes 1,000 credits and no credit card.