| name | stardust:extract |
| description | Crawl an existing website (capped, multi-page) and seed stardust/current/ with PRODUCT.md, DESIGN.md, DESIGN.json, a per-page inventory, and the consolidated brand surface. |
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 to do
useful work. Lift the cap with --cap 25 (the previous default)
or higher 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).
--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:
- Playwright availability. The extraction step needs a real
browser. Detect Playwright in this order: a Playwright MCP server,
then
npx playwright. If neither is available, stop and tell the
user how to install Playwright.
- 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.
Procedure
Phase 1 — Discovery
Discover the page inventory before crawling. Procedure in
reference/ia-extraction.md. In summary:
-
Fetch <origin>/sitemap.xml, then <origin>/sitemap_index.xml,
then check robots.txt for Sitemap: directives.
-
If no sitemap is reachable, run a same-origin BFS crawl from
<url>, depth-limited to 3, link-extracting from rendered HTML.
-
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).
-
De-duplicate trailing-slash variations.
-
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.
-
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. The default cap is small enough that the common
case is "extract 5 pages and move on"; pausing for a yes/no
reply on every run is friction without value. 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.
-
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. The recipe is mandatory —
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
- Content: visible text per section, 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/srcset with original URLs and intrinsic
dimensions, inline SVG count, video/iframe presence
- Interactive elements: forms (with field types), buttons, modals
detected by ARIA roles
Save to stardust/current/pages/<slug>.json with _provenance as the
first key. Save referenced media to stardust/current/assets/media/
preserving basename plus a short content hash.
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 3 — Brand-surface extraction
Run once, after Phase 2 has finished, so cross-page aggregation
has data to work with. 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. 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>.
- 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.
- 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.
Do not invent values. Every captured value cites a source selector or
URL in _brand-extraction.json for traceability.
Phase 4 — Seed stardust/current/PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md
The current-state PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md are descriptive, not
authored — there is no interview to run because the user is not
defining intent here, the agent is describing the existing site. Write
them directly using impeccable's format specs:
- For PRODUCT.md, follow the section structure in impeccable's
reference/teach.md. Populate Register from the brand surface
(sites that read as marketing/landing → brand; tools/dashboards →
product; ambiguous → brand with a note). Populate Users,
Product Purpose, Brand Personality, Anti-references, and
Design Principles from the captured copy and the brand surface.
Where the agent must infer, mark the section with _provenance: inferred and a one-line basis sentence.
- For DESIGN.md and DESIGN.json, follow the format spec in
impeccable's
reference/document.md. Populate frontmatter
(colors, typography, rounded, spacing, components) from
the captured tokens. The extensions block of DESIGN.json carries
v1's componentStyle, motifs, and voice arrays so nothing is
lost.
Stardust does not invoke $impeccable teach or $impeccable document for the current-state files: those commands write to project
root (the target) and run an interview. Stardust authors the
descriptive snapshot directly. The format spec from impeccable is the
contract; the runtime command is not.
The target-state PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md at the project root are
written by $stardust direct in Phase 2 of the pipeline, not here.
Phase 5 — Render stardust/current/brand-review.html
After Phase 4 writes the descriptive PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md, emit
the current-state brand review per
reference/brand-review-template.md.
The brand-review HTML is the first surface a human can eyeball to
verify the extraction before committing to a redesign direction.
Misreads in the JSON (a wrong dominant radius, a missing system
component, a single-page palette bias) are obvious to the eye in five
seconds and invisible in JSON until someone notices. Putting the
review at the end of extract catches misreads while they are still
cheap to fix — re-extract is fast; re-direct + re-prototype is not.
The template is mandatory. In particular:
- Run the Tensions detectors listed in
reference/brand-review-template.md § Detectors. Each rule is
mechanical; emit a tension card whenever the trigger condition
matches. The review may ship with zero tensions if the data is
too thin to evaluate, but the detectors must always be run.
- Render in the brand's own captured colors and fonts, not a
stardust shell.
- Embed all CSS; do not load external JavaScript or fonts unless
the live site already does.
- Cite the source artifact for every section (e.g.
_brand-extraction.json § type under Typography).
If the data for a section is missing, omit the section — do not
fabricate placeholders. The coverage callout at the top reflects what
is missing.
Phase 6 — Update state and report
After all Phase 2-5 writes succeed:
-
Update stardust/state.json (schema in
skills/stardust/reference/state-machine.md):
site.originUrl, site.extractedAt, site.pageCap,
site.totalDiscovered, site.crawled
pages[] — one entry per crawled page with status: "extracted",
filled currentStatePath, empty prototypePath and migratedPath
-
Print a one-screen summary:
Extracted https://example.com (5/38 pages, sitemap.xml)
stardust/current/
PRODUCT.md (register: brand, inferred from landing)
DESIGN.md (5 colors, 2 type families, 3 motifs)
brand-review.html (4 tensions surfaced)
pages/ (5 files)
assets/logo.svg (extracted from inline SVG)
_brand-extraction.json
_crawl-log.json
Wait summary: 4 resolved at medium (avg 2.4s), 1 fallback (timed out at 8s)
→ /donate/ may be under-captured; consider --refresh
Open stardust/current/brand-review.html to verify the extraction
before running $stardust direct.
Coverage note: extracted 5 of 38 discovered pages. The brand
surface and brand-review use cross-page aggregation, so 5 pages
covering distinct templates is usually sufficient. To extract
more, re-run with --cap <N> (e.g. --cap 25) or list specific
slugs with --pages.
Next: $stardust direct (resolve a redesign direction)
Compute the wait summary by grouping each page's _provenance.waitMode
and averaging waitMs. List slugs whose waitMode ends in
(fallback) as candidates for --refresh.
Outputs
| Path | Purpose |
|---|
stardust/current/PRODUCT.md | Descriptive strategy of the existing site (impeccable format) |
stardust/current/DESIGN.md | Descriptive visual system (Stitch format) |
stardust/current/DESIGN.json | Sidecar with extensions for motifs, voice, components |
stardust/current/brand-review.html | Self-contained visual review of the extraction (first eyeball-able artifact) |
stardust/current/pages/<slug>.json | Per-page parsed structure + content |
stardust/current/assets/logo.<ext> | Extracted logo |
stardust/current/assets/media/ | Extracted media referenced by pages |
stardust/current/assets/screenshots/ | Per-page viewport screenshots (used by brand-review) |
stardust/current/_brand-extraction.json | Consolidated brand surface (palette, type, motifs, voice, system components) |
stardust/current/_crawl-log.json | Discovery + crawl audit trail |
stardust/state.json | Updated with site + per-page status |
Concurrency
Per state-machine.md: stardust does not lock. Two concurrent extracts
on the same project are last-write-wins. Document this in the user
report; do not engineer around it.
Failure modes
- Network failure mid-crawl. Continue, record in
_crawl-log.json,
end with a partial state. State.json reflects only successfully
extracted pages. User can re-run; already-extracted pages are
skipped unless --refresh <slug>.
- HTTP 4xx/5xx, non-HTML content, soft-404s. Validated explicitly
per
reference/playwright-recipe.md § Response validation. Each
produces a distinct error class (HTTPError, ContentTypeError,
EmptyPageError) recorded in _crawl-log.json#crawl.failures[].
Failed pages do not appear in state.json as extracted —
they appear only in the failure log. Without this validation a 5xx
page silently lands as an empty success and propagates wrong data
to direct and prototype.
- Login wall. Do not attempt to authenticate. If the home page
redirects to a login screen, capture that one page, mark the rest as
unreachable, and ask the user how to proceed (provide cookies via
Playwright config, change the entry URL, or scope to public pages).
- JavaScript-only content. Playwright already handles this. If
the configured wait condition never fires within the mode's hard
cap (
reference/playwright-recipe.md § Wait modes), fall back to
domcontentloaded and capture what is rendered. Record the
fallback in the per-page _provenance.waitMode and surface in the
wait-summary line of the final report.
Prep mode (--prep)
When invoked with --prep, extract runs an extended pass that
prepares the inventory for migration. Discovery-mode runs (without
--prep) are unchanged: small cap, no typing, no module detection,
presales-friendly. --prep is the gesture that says "the user is
committing to migrate; build the data structure migrate consumes."
--prep adds five things on top of the standard procedure:
1. Lift the cap
--prep implies --all. Migration coverage requires the full
inventory — the small discovery cap (5 pages) is insufficient. The
cap-respecting selection logic from reference/ia-extraction.md
§ Page selection still applies for ordering and junk-filtering;
it just doesn't truncate.
2. Page typing
For each extracted page, infer the type field from URL pattern
and content shape (LLM judgment). Catalog from
skills/stardust/reference/state-machine.md § Page types:
landing | article | listing | program | form | static | unique.
Write the inferred type to state.json.pages[].type. The user
confirms or refines during direct --prep. Discovery-mode runs
leave type as null.
3. Module candidate detection
After Phase 3 (brand-surface extraction), scan extracted pages for
recurring structural patterns. A pattern that appears in N+
pages with similar shape (same sequence of elements, same
data-section / data-purpose, similar text shape) is surfaced
as a module candidate.
Candidate output is a draft entry under
DESIGN.json.extensions.modules[]:
{
"id": "candidate-<short-hash>",
"slots": [
{ "name": "<inferred>", "type": "text|link|image|...", "required": false }
],
"instances": [
{ "slug": "home", "selector": "..." },
{ "slug": "donate", "selector": "..." }
],
"status": "candidate"
}
The status: "candidate" flag distinguishes draft entries from
confirmed modules. direct --prep is where the user names them
and promotes (or prunes).
4. Typed content slots
Per-page JSON (current/pages/<slug>.json) gains a slots
section that identifies content slots per page-type:
article pages: headline, deck, byline, meta,
lead-image, body, pullquotes[], related[]
listing pages: index-headline, filter-controls,
card-grid with typed sub-slots per card
program pages: program-headline, summary,
feature-grid, cta-band
landing, form, static — typed slots inferred per
content shape
Schema additions live in reference/current-state-schema.md
§ Typed slots (extend that doc separately).
5. Prep summary
Replace Phase 6's standard report with the prep summary format:
extract --prep complete
=======================
Inventory: 127 pages crawled (5 prior, 122 new)
Page types: landing 1 · article 84 · listing 6 · program 12 · form 3 · static 18 · unique 3
(LLM-inferred; refine in direct --prep)
Module candidates: 8
hotline-211 5 instances (home, get-help, donate, news, programs)
donate-band 12 instances (home, donate, news, all article footers)
story-card 7 instances (home, news, programs)
...
Typed slots: filled per page-type (see current/pages/<slug>.json § slots)
Next: $stardust direct --prep (confirm types, name modules)
Default mode (no --prep) is unchanged. The flag is intended for
the prepare-migration orchestrator, though direct invocation is
supported.
References
reference/playwright-recipe.md — viewport, capture list, logo locator chain.
reference/ia-extraction.md — sitemap + BFS crawl + cap procedure.
reference/current-state-schema.md — per-page JSON schema.
reference/brand-surface.md — consolidated brand-surface schema.
reference/brand-review-template.md — current-state brand-review HTML contract + Tensions detectors.
skills/stardust/reference/state-machine.md — state.json contract.
skills/stardust/reference/artifact-map.md — provenance shape.