Extract

stardust:extract

Crawl an existing website, parse each page, extract the brand surface, and produce a stardust-formatted snapshot of the current state under stardust/current/. The output describes what the site is; later sub-commands consume it to decide what it should be.

This skill is descriptive: it does not invent direction, it does not critique, and it does not modify the live site. It writes only under stardust/current/ and updates stardust/state.json.

Inputs

• <url> — required. The origin to crawl. Examples: https://example.com, https://example.com/shop. A path narrows the same-origin crawl to that subtree.
• --cap <N> — optional. Override the default 5-page cap. The cap is intentionally small — a 5-page sample (home + four IA pillars/templates) is enough for cross-page brand aggregation, system-component detection, and the brand-review HTML; lift it (e.g. --cap 25) when a deeper crawl is genuinely needed.
• --all — optional. Lift the cap entirely; extract every discovered page after junk filtering. Equivalent to --cap 0. Use when the user spontaneously asks for a full crawl.
• --pages <slug,slug,...> — optional. Restrict the crawl to specific paths (slugs derived per reference/ia-extraction.md). Bypasses the cap.
• --refresh <slug> — optional. Re-extract one page that already exists in state.json.
• --single — optional. Equivalent to --cap 1. Useful for testing.
• --wait <fast|medium|spec|auto> — optional. Wait strategy per page. Default medium. See reference/playwright-recipe.md § Wait modes.
• --no-junk-filter — optional. Disable the default junk-page filter in discovery (see reference/ia-extraction.md § Filtering).
• --no-consent-dismiss — optional. Skip the pre-flight consent / cookie banner dismissal (see reference/playwright-recipe.md § Pre-flight: consent dismissal). Use when the redesign scope includes the consent surface or the dismissal's side-effects (script activation that wouldn't otherwise run) must be avoided. Default is to dismiss, keeping screenshots, voice aggregation, and per-section style unpolluted by the banner.
• --dynamics — optional, migration-bound. Record per-page reach signals of the dynamic surface (data endpoints, forms, modal triggers, player ids) in each page JSON dynamic section and roll them up in _crawl-log.json#dynamicSurface. Set by prepare-migration, replica and migrate's safety net; never by a bare extract, uplift or audit — dynamics is a migration concern. Depth and classification belong to the stardust dynamics skill.
• --concurrency <n> — optional. Parallel browser contexts for the per-page capture loop. Default 4; sane range 4–8. See § Concurrency.
• --brand-source <url> — optional, repeatable. An additional same-brand origin whose brand surface enriches the primary extraction (shallow capture: home + up to 2 nav-linked pages). See § Cross-site brand sources.
• --design-source <url> — optional. Design-donor origin: its design system is captured to stardust/canon-source/ and becomes the fixed redesign target while the primary origin supplies content. See § Cross-site brand sources.
• --prep — optional. Run in migrate-prep mode: lift the cap, type each page, detect module candidates, capture typed content slots, emit the prep summary. See § Prep mode below. Typically invoked via the prepare-migration orchestrator skill rather than directly.

Setup

Run the master skill's setup procedure first (skills/stardust/SKILL.md § Setup): impeccable dep check, context loader, state read.

Additional checks for this sub-command:

1. Playwright availability. The extraction step needs a real browser. Detect Playwright in this order: a Playwright MCP server, then a project-importable playwright module. The npx playwright probe is NOT sufficient — it confirms the CLI (which resolves a global install) but the recipe and scripts/crawl.mjs do import { chromium } from 'playwright', and ESM module resolution does not honour a global install or NODE_PATH — the import throws ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND even where npx playwright --version succeeds. Verify the module is import-resolvable from the project root (probe: node -e "import('playwright').then(()=>process.exit(0))"); if it isn't, run npm i -D playwright pixelmatch pngjs cheerio --legacy-peer-deps (devDependencies, never --no-save — #125) or use the Playwright MCP server, before crawling. The --legacy-peer-deps flag is required on aem-boilerplate targets (their pinned eslint@8 makes a plain npm i exit ERESOLVE before playwright is even considered). Don't trust the CLI probe alone.

   --no-save installs are ephemeral. Any later real npm i (e.g. a setup step adding a devDependency) prunes non-manifest packages, silently removing playwright mid-pipeline. Every downstream skill that renders (prototype, migrate, deploy, diff) must re-run the import-resolvability probe — and re-install on failure — at the start of its own run, not assume extract's install survived.

   Script location matters. ESM resolves import 'playwright' from the script's directory and the plugin tree ships no node_modules: copy every script byte-identical into the project (stardust/scripts/…) and run the copy.

   Bundled crawler. skills/extract/scripts/crawl.mjs is a runnable reference implementation of this whole sub-command — browser config + bot-management fallback, consent dismissal, wait

   • scroll, the capture list, per-page full-page screenshots (assets/screenshots/<slug>.png, consumed by the Phase 2.5 vision gate), response validation, and the § Capture-hygiene hardening (visibility filter, interstitial drop, SPA-shell flag, modal textContent capture, tracking-pixel discounting, cross-page duplicate detection). Prefer invoking it over hand-rolling a Playwright script per run; extend its in-page capture() to cover any recipe field it doesn't yet emit.

2. Origin collision. If stardust/state.json already records site.originUrl and the new <url> is a different origin, stop and ask before clobbering. Stardust does not silently mix two sites in one project. Flow guard (migration asks only). If the ask carries migration intent ("migrate", "to EDS", "re-platform", "1:1", "replica") and stardust/state.json exists — or is about to be created — without flow, hand back to the master skill § Two migration flows before crawling: the flow is chosen and stamped there, and a keep-design ask enters through replica (which invokes this skill with --prep itself). A bare extract <url> for a redesign, audit or uplift is unaffected. (Recorded: extract on a raw URL as the entry of a same-design migration; the agent then built its own importer beside replica.)

3. Browser contexts. Open a fresh BrowserContext per capture worker (§ Concurrency; default 4). Run the consent dismissal pre-flight per reference/playwright-recipe.md § Pre-flight: consent dismissal unless --no-consent-dismiss is set. Cookies persist within a context but not across contexts — re-establish consent state per context (re-run the dismissal on the worker's first page, or clone the probe context's storageState). Record the resolved method in _crawl-log.json#consent.method.

4. Bot-management probe. When the first navigation in the run returns ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR or ERR_QUIC_PROTOCOL_ERROR, or hangs through the entire hard-cap on what should be a fast origin, do not retry headless — switch to headed Chrome per § Failure modes → Bot-management block and record the switch in _crawl-log.json#discovery.fetchTechnique so re-runs start in headed mode without rediscovering the issue.

Procedure

Phase 1 — Discovery

Discover the page inventory before crawling. Procedure in reference/ia-extraction.md. In summary:

1. Fetch <origin>/sitemap.xml, then <origin>/sitemap_index.xml, then check robots.txt for Sitemap: directives.

2. If no sitemap is reachable, run a same-origin BFS crawl from <url>, depth-limited to 3, link-extracting from rendered HTML.

3. Filter the discovered URL list: same origin only, exclude mailto:, tel:, anchor-only links, query-only variations, common asset paths (.css, .js, .pdf, image extensions).

4. De-duplicate trailing-slash variations.

5. Apply the junk-page filter (reference/ia-extraction.md § Junk-page filter) unless --no-junk-filter is set. Surface the filtered list to the user as overridable.

6. Apply the cap (default 5, or --cap, or --all for no cap) and proceed silently. Print an informational summary of what was kept and what was cut — but do not gate on user confirmation. Users who want different scope set it spontaneously at command time:

   $stardust extract https://example.com              # default 5 pages
   $stardust extract https://example.com --cap 25     # bump to 25
   $stardust extract https://example.com --all        # lift the cap
   $stardust extract https://example.com --pages home,about,pricing
   $stardust extract https://example.com --single     # just the entry URL

   The agent reads spontaneous scope intent from the user's prompt (e.g. "extract all pages", "look at just the home and pricing", "do a full crawl") and applies the equivalent flag. No re-confirmation needed once intent is clear.

   Informational output (not a prompt — proceed immediately):

   Discovered 38 pages on https://example.com (sitemap.xml).
   Filtered as likely junk (5): /test/, /sample-page/, /holiday1/, ...
   Selecting 5 highest-priority pages:
     - / (home)
     - /about
     - /pricing
     - /products
     - /contact
   
   Cut (28 pages, --all to lift): /blog/post-1, /blog/post-2, ...
   
   Extracting...

   Selection heuristic: page-type checklist first, then score-based ranking (home + IA-pillar keywords + sitemap priority − archive / version markers). See reference/ia-extraction.md § Page selection and § Priority for the cap. The English-only keyword list is a known limitation for localized sites.

7. Write the discovered list to stardust/current/_crawl-log.json (created if absent) with _provenance and the full discovery reasoning, including filteredAsJunk[] and userChoice. This is an audit trail, not a state file.

Phase 2 — Per-page extraction

For each page in the cap-respecting list, render with Playwright following reference/playwright-recipe.md. Captures run concurrently per § Concurrency. The recipe is mandatory per page — in particular, do not skip the wait, scroll, or capture-list steps:

• Viewport 1440 × 900 @ 2× DPR
• Wait per the configured wait mode (default medium; see § Wait modes in reference/playwright-recipe.md)
• Disable animations via prefers-reduced-motion: reduce
• After the wait resolves, scroll to bottom in 4 viewport-height steps with 300 ms pauses, then return to top — this is required to trigger lazy-load and IntersectionObserver-driven content
• Record waitMs and waitMode in the per-page _provenance

Capture per page (full schema in reference/current-state-schema.md):

• Page metadata (title, meta description, OG tags, theme-color)

• Semantic structure: heading outline, landmark roles, sections

• Hero headline + lede (resolved) — heroHeadline / heroLede picked by font-size × hero-region with a junk/hidden-state filter and a clean meta-description fallback (per reference/playwright-recipe.md § Capture list 5-bis). Required for JS-rendered sites whose document-order headings surface modal / promo / count junk instead of the real tagline.

• Content: visible text per section (full innerText, no truncation per reference/playwright-recipe.md § Capture list 7), structured paragraphs (body[]), lists, FAQ Q/A pairs, and review/testimonial quotes per § Capture list 7-bis. Without these structured fields, every body region under a heading falls back to placeholder signature at migrate time.

• CTA labels and href targets, link inventory (internal vs external)

• Per-section computed style summary: dominant colors, font families in use, spacing rhythm, border-radius, shadows

• Media inventory: img with currentSrc/srcset captured with query strings intact plus a resolves flag (HEAD/GET with browser UA + Referer), intrinsic dimensions, inline SVG count, video/iframe presence, cssBackgrounds[] (including pseudo-element ::before/ ::after walks per § Capture list 11) so background-image heroes and motifs do not silently disappear and 404ing CDN images are flagged before migrate ships about:error.

• Font files captured via network-intercept (per § Capture list 16): every woff2/woff/ttf/otf response saved under assets/fonts/ and recorded in _brand-extraction.json#type.files[] with licensing flag.

• Icon-font detection (per § Capture list 17): when the page uses [class^="icon-"] with non-default ::before font-family + codepoint, capture the family, save the file, and record the iconClass → codepoint table in _brand-extraction.json#iconFont.

• Interactive elements: forms (with field types), buttons, modals detected by ARIA roles

• Full-page screenshot to assets/screenshots/<slug>.png — script-captured by the bundled crawler after the wait/scroll settle (viewport-only fallback on extremely tall pages; mode in _signals.screenshotMode, relative path in the page JSON screenshot field)

• Dynamic surface (only with --dynamics) — per-page reach signals: endpoints, third-party script hosts, forms, modal triggers, player ids, hydration hints, in the page JSON dynamic section and _crawl-log.json#dynamicSurface (schema in reference/current-state-schema.md § Dynamic). Evidence only; the stardust dynamics sub-skill probes archetypes in depth and decides.

Save to stardust/current/pages/<slug>.json with _provenance as the first key. The bundled crawler also saves the settled rendered DOM verbatim as stardust/current/pages/<slug>.html (page.content() after the wait/scroll settle; path in the record's renderedHtml field). Capture once, parse offline: every downstream importer or sibling generator iterates its extraction against this artifact — free, reproducible, and provenance — instead of re-running live probes per selector guess (recorded: 4+ live round-trips per page family before the switch). Live probes stay for what the static DOM cannot answer: geometry and computed styles. Save referenced media to stardust/current/assets/media/ preserving basename plus a short content hash.

Live-render evidence (synthesis is forbidden). Refuse to mark a page extracted in state.json unless its _provenance contains renderedBy: "playwright", an ISO-8601 fetchedAt, a positive integer waitMs, a waitMode from the recipe, and a final httpStatus in the 2xx/3xx range. These five fields are the contract enforced by reference/current-state-schema.md § Live-render evidence and read back by every downstream phase via validateProvenance() per skills/stardust/reference/state-machine.md § Provenance validation. Synthesizing a page record from _brand-extraction.json plus URL patterns plus captured photos — the 2026-04-30 e-commerce shortcut — is the failure mode this guard exists to prevent. When the agent (or a delegated sub- agent) cannot satisfy the contract for a page, treat the page as a Phase 2 failure: record under _crawl-log.json#crawl.failures[] with errorClass: "ProvenanceMissing" and continue.

Mark the page extracted in state.json immediately after each successful page write. If a page fails, record the error in _crawl-log.json and continue — extraction is best-effort per page.

Phase 2.5 — Vision verification

Before anything downstream is authored, look at each captured page's screenshot (assets/screenshots/<slug>.png) — the multimodal model reads the image — and verify it against the extracted record:

• Does the recorded hero (headline + asset) match what the pixels show?
• Is the extracted palette plausible against the pixels?
• Does a cssBackgrounds: [] record look believable, or is imagery visibly present — a silent capture failure?
• Is the logo captured?
• Is the page actually rendered — not a consent wall, bot-block page, or blank SPA shell?

Read the whole page through its thumbnail — node stardust/scripts/thumb.mjs stardust/current/assets/screenshots/<slug>.png --width 480 (skills/extract/scripts/thumb.mjs, copied beside crawl.mjs; a box-filter downscale, so 1-px rules and hairline borders survive; its --max-bytes cap, 150 KB by default, re-encodes a heavy page narrower first and crops only as a last resort, never below 60 % of the page) — never the full-resolution screenshot, and read any detail as a crop of the full capture. The check is of the WHOLE page: read the script's stdout line before the image, and when it prints a share below 100 (cropped at <n>px of <H> = <share>%) run the same command with --offset <n> and read <slug>-thumb-<n>.png too, repeating while its rows <n>-<end>px line ends short of <H>. A recorded hands-off run's thumbnails kept a median 28 % of each page and the check read them as the page. A thumbnail enters the context only after thumb.mjs has written it (≤ 150 KB, or the floor thumbnail it named on stderr, exit 1) — or the vision check runs in a subagent that reads the thumbnails and returns one line per page (<slug>: ok | recaptured | suspect — <note>); a recorded hands-off run read eight *-thumb.png files of 268–608 KB each into one context — 3.2 MB of pixels for eight verdicts.

On mismatch, re-run that page's capture with the escalation ladder before proceeding: bump the wait mode one step (reference/playwright-recipe.md § Wait modes), then headed Chrome (§ Bot-management fallback), then a fresh browser context. Record the outcome per page in _crawl-log.json#visionCheck[]:

{ "slug": "pricing", "verdict": "recaptured", "notes": "record said zero CSS backgrounds; screenshot shows a full-bleed photo hero" }

verdict is "ok" | "recaptured" | "suspect" — suspect means the mismatch survived the ladder; downstream phases treat that record as unreliable. Vision is the authoritative capture check; the heuristic defenses (low-media flag, spaShellSuspect, duplicate hash) remain as cheap early signals but no longer gate alone.

Phase 3 — Brand-surface extraction

Run after the capture phases (2–2.5). Aggregation may proceed incrementally as concurrent page captures complete (§ Concurrency), but the written file must reflect every extracted page — including brand-source pages per § Cross-site brand sources. Produces stardust/current/_brand-extraction.json per reference/brand-surface.md. Some fields are home-only (logo, voice samples, register heuristic); the visual tokens that drive DESIGN.md (palette, radius, shadow, type) are aggregated across all extracted pages to avoid the home-page bias documented in brand-surface.md § Aggregation scope.

Computed-style census — run the shipped instrument; author no probe. node <plugin>/skills/extract/scripts/style-census.mjs (copied into the project like crawl.mjs, § Setup) measures every captured page at 1440 and writes stardust/current/_computed-styles.json; add --width 360 when the breakpoints include it. One more live pass over every page — run it ONCE, after the crawl, in the background; it opens the live side through live-session.mjs like every other live instrument. Read the palette, type, motif and hover values from the file's aggregate and cite each from its sources[] (url, selector, prop); the per-page detail sits under pages[url][width].

Content-cap model — run the shipped probe; author no lift (#124). node stardust/scripts/replica/cap-probe.mjs <archetype-url>… --write-design stardust/current/DESIGN.json (replica's script; copy it with live-session.mjs) renders each archetype at 1440 and at a DERIVED wide width — max(2560, largest cap × 1.25); a probe AT a cap's width cannot see it — and records every box that stops growing (kind shell / content / module, px, authored via, tier) into extensions.breakpoints: containerMaxWidth (the --max-width source; null when fluid), probeWidth, caps[], modules[]. One navigation per archetype after the census (never beside it), once DESIGN.json is authored (it merges). A cap on the shell or on every archetype is design intent whatever its value; capRegister lists single-module or archetype-divergent caps for the inconsistency register. The cap model never records layout breakpoints: a redesign target keeps its own two; replica keeps the source's, or maps them to --target-breakpoints. Captures:

• Logo by the v1 priority chain: inline SVG → <img> with logo-ish class/id → apple-touch-icon → og:image → favicon → synthesized placeholder. Save to stardust/current/assets/logo.<ext>.
• Favicon — ALWAYS captured as its own asset (independent of the logo chain) to stardust/current/assets/favicon.<ext>, per reference/playwright-recipe.md § Favicon capture. Downstream, prototype embeds it in the proposed page head and deploy ships it to the Edge Delivery site.
• Palette — aggregate computed colors across all extracted pages (background, text, accents, borders, hovers). Frequency-sort, cluster near-duplicates, emit a role-named list (background, surface, text, primary, secondary, accent).
• Type — font families in use with their weights, sizes, and computed line-heights. Identify the heading family vs body family. Run the modular-scale audit (brand-surface.md § Modular-scale audit) and emit scaleAudit.kind = "modular" | "ad-hoc".
• Motifs — signature border-radius (cross-page mode of non-zero values, weighted by element count), shadow stack (top 3 distinct, cross-page), gradient inventory, common patterns (chip, badge, card, hero-with-image). When the home-only mode disagrees with the cross-page mode, surface the divergence in _provenance.notes.
• Voice samples — first paragraph of body copy, the hero headline, 3 representative CTA labels, a representative link list. Used by direct later but extracted now so the network round-trip is over.
• Hero image — elevate the home page's primary visual asset to voice.heroImage (per reference/brand-surface.md § heroImage resolution), so downstream prototype picks the live hero rather than the og:image from the raw media list.
• Hero medium (signature) — when the hero/first viewport carries a moving asset (background <video> / HLS / canvas / WebGL / Lottie / animated SVG / scroll-driven motion), elevate it to voice.heroMedium (per reference/brand-surface.md § heroMedium resolution). This is the page's signature; without elevation downstream prototype flattens it to a static hero. A non-null heroMedium triggers signature preservation (skills/stardust/reference/intent-dimensions.md § 8b) at prototype time.
• Icon font — when detected per reference/playwright-recipe.md § Capture list 17, populate _brand-extraction.json#iconFont with family, file path, and the iconClass → codepoint table so prototypes can render the brand's actual icons.
• System components — cross-page repeated DOM blocks (site header, site footer, cross-promo strips, persistent CTAs, breadcrumbs). Detected by heading-sequence + CTA-label fingerprint per reference/brand-surface.md § System components. Required — these are usually the most load-bearing surfaces and must not silently disappear from the redesign target.
• Origins — one entry per contributing origin in _brand-extraction.json#origins[] per reference/brand-surface.md § Origins. Single-origin runs emit a one-entry array; brand-source runs attribute widened evidence per origin.

Do not invent values. Every captured value cites a source selector or URL in _brand-extraction.json for traceability.