Quickstart

Step 1 - Get your API key

Open Dashboard →

Once you’re signed in:

Click API Keys in the sidebar

Click Create API Key and give it a name (like “Playground”)

Copy the key - it starts with rdr_ and you’ll only see it once

Treat your API key like a password. Never commit it to version control or expose it in client-side code.

Step 2 - Make your first request

Reader has one endpoint for everything: POST /v1/read. Send a URL, get back clean markdown.

curl -X POST https://api.reader.dev/v1/read \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: rdr_your_api_key" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com"
  }'

import { ReaderClient } from "@vakra-dev/reader-js";

const reader = new ReaderClient({
  apiKey: "rdr_your_api_key",
});

const result = await reader.read({
  url: "https://example.com",
});

if (result.kind === "scrape") {
  console.log(result.data.markdown);
}

from reader_py import ReaderClient

with ReaderClient(api_key="rdr_your_api_key") as reader:
    result = reader.read(url="https://example.com")
    if result.kind == "scrape":
        print(result.data.markdown)

You should get back something like:

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "markdown": "# Example Domain\n\nThis domain is for use in...",
    "metadata": {
      "title": "Example Domain",
      "description": "...",
      "statusCode": 200
    }
  }
}

That’s it. You just scraped a page.

Step 3 - Try something more interesting

Scrape a real article with main content extraction:

curl -X POST https://api.reader.dev/v1/read \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: rdr_your_api_key" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
    "formats": ["markdown"],
    "onlyMainContent": true
  }'

Reader strips navigation, sidebars, and footers - you get just the article body as markdown. Perfect for feeding to an LLM.

Get Started

Concepts

Getting Started Guides

Async Workflows

Production Patterns

Advanced Scraping

LLM & AI Use Cases

Troubleshooting

Step 1 - Get your API key

Open Dashboard →

Step 2 - Make your first request

Step 3 - Try something more interesting

What’s next

Scrape vs Crawl

Batch scraping

Crawling a website

SDKs

​Step 1 - Get your API key

Open Dashboard →

​Step 2 - Make your first request

​Step 3 - Try something more interesting

​What’s next

Scrape vs Crawl

Batch scraping

Crawling a website

SDKs

Step 1 - Get your API key

Step 2 - Make your first request

Step 3 - Try something more interesting

What’s next