url-to-md

A Deno CLI tool that converts any webpage to clean Markdown format using Playwright and Mozilla Readability.

Features

• Uses Playwright to render JavaScript-heavy websites
• Extracts main article content using Mozilla Readability
• Converts HTML to clean Markdown format
• Preserves article metadata (title, byline, excerpt)
• Outputs to file or stdout

Prerequisites

• Deno 2.0 or later

Installation

Deno install technique

deno install -A --global -n url-to-md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zph/url-to-md/refs/heads/main/url-to-md.ts

Install Playwright browsers first

Before using the tool, install the required browser:

npx playwright install chromium

Make executable

chmod +x url-to-md.ts

Install globally

deno install -A -n url-to-md url-to-md.ts

After installation, you can use url-to-md from anywhere.

Or run directly

# With shebang (after chmod +x)
./url-to-md.ts <url>

# Or with deno command
deno run -A url-to-md.ts <url>

Usage

Basic usage (output to stdout)

url-to-md https://example.com

Save to file

url-to-md https://example.com -o article.md

Using directly

./url-to-md.ts https://example.com -o article.md

Command Line Options

• -o, --output <file> - Output file (default: stdout)
• -h, --help - Show help message

How it works

1. Launches a headless Chromium browser using Playwright
2. Navigates to the specified URL and waits for the page to fully load
3. Extracts the rendered HTML content
4. Uses Mozilla Readability to extract the main article content
5. Converts the HTML to Markdown using Turndown
6. Adds metadata (title, byline, excerpt, source URL)
7. Outputs the result

Permissions

The tool uses -A (all permissions) which includes:

• --allow-net - To fetch webpages
• --allow-write - To write output files
• --allow-read - To read configuration
• --allow-env - For Playwright to access environment variables
• --allow-run - For Playwright to launch the browser
• --allow-ffi - For Playwright's native bindings
• --allow-sys - For Playwright to detect system information

Examples

Convert a blog post to Markdown:

url-to-md https://blog.example.com/my-post -o post.md

Convert a news article:

url-to-md https://news.example.com/article/123 -o article.md

Pipe output to another tool:

url-to-md https://example.com | grep "keyword"

License

MIT