defuddle: Web Page Cleaner
Defuddle extracts the meaningful content from a web page and drops everything else: ads, cookie banners, nav bars, related articles, footers, social sharing buttons. What remains is the article body as clean markdown.
Use this before any URL ingestion. It is optional but strongly recommended. It cuts token usage by 40-60% on typical web articles and produces cleaner wiki pages.
Substrate note (v1.7+): Unlike obsidian-markdown / obsidian-bases / json-canvas (where we defer to kepano/obsidian-skills as upstream), the defuddle skill is original to claude-obsidian — kepano's marketplace does not ship a defuddle skill. This is the canonical version. The underlying defuddle-cli is independent of either marketplace and lives at github.com/kepano/defuddle.
Install
npm install -g defuddle-cli
Verify: defuddle --version
Usage
Clean a URL directly
defuddle https://example.com/article
Outputs clean markdown to stdout.
Save to .raw/
defuddle https://example.com/article > .raw/articles/article-slug-$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md
Add frontmatter header after saving
After running defuddle, prepend the source URL and fetch date:
SLUG="article-slug-$(date +%Y-%m-%d)"
{ echo "---"; echo "source_url: https://example.com/article"; echo "fetched: $(date +%Y-%m-%d)"; echo "---"; echo ""; defuddle https://example.com/article; } > .raw/articles/$SLUG.md
Clean a local HTML file
defuddle page.html
When to Use
Use defuddle when:
- Ingesting a news article, blog post, or documentation page from a URL
- The page has a lot of surrounding content (most web pages do)
- You want to stay within token budget on a long article
Skip defuddle when:
- The source is already a clean markdown or PDF file
- The page is a dashboard, app, or structured data (defuddle expects article-style content)
- defuddle is not installed and the article is short enough to process raw
Fallback
If defuddle is not installed, check:
which defuddle 2>/dev/null || echo "not installed"
If not installed: use WebFetch directly. The content will be less clean but still workable.
Integration with /wiki-ingest
The /wiki-ingest skill checks for defuddle automatically when a URL is passed. You do not need to run defuddle manually before ingesting a URL. The ingest skill will call it if available.
To manually clean a page and save before ingesting:
- Run the save command above
- Then:
ingest .raw/articles/[slug].md
How to think (10-principle mapping)
When working on this skill, apply the 10-principle loop. See skills/think/SKILL.md for the canonical framework.
| # | Principle | Application here |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | OBSERVE (ext) | Which URL? What's actually on the page? Don't assume the title matches the content. |
| 2 | OBSERVE (int) | Am I assuming the page has the content the user expects? Verify before extracting. |
| 3 | LISTEN | Did the user say "the article" (main content only) or "the link" (everything visible)? |
| 4 | THINK | Strip boilerplate, preserve structure, capture metadata. Quote URLs in shell to avoid injection. |
| 5 | CONNECT (lat) | How does this domain typically render? Some sites mangle defuddle's heuristics; track those. |
| 6 | CONNECT (sys) | Shells out to defuddle-cli (kepano); output lands in .raw/ for wiki-ingest pickup. |
| 7 | FEEL | Clean markdown that reads like the original, not boilerplate residue. |
| 8 | ACCEPT | Some pages don't extract well. Flag and move on; don't force when the heuristic loses. |
| 9 | CREATE | Markdown to stdout, redirected to .raw/articles/<slug>-<date>.md. |
| 10 | GROW | Extraction failures suggest defuddle-cli upgrade or alternative extractor — track them as backlog. |