Fetch URL

Use this skill to download remote HTTP(S) content — raw API calls, web pages, JSON endpoints, small files — safely. Private and metadata hosts are blocked by default to prevent SSRF.

Use when

• "Fetch this URL"
• "What does this API return?"
• Pipeline: fetch → pdf-extract → summarize_text
• Fetch a webhook payload or a small data file
• Check a public HTTP endpoint (status + headers)

Do not use when

• Downloading binaries/archives > 50 MB (hard cap; the LLM context can't hold them anyway)
• Long-poll / streaming / SSE / WebSocket — this is one-shot request/response
• Authenticated APIs with complex OAuth flows — use a purpose-built extension (github, whisper, summarize) that owns the auth
• Calling internal services — set allow_private: true only on explicitly trusted operator calls

Tools

status

No arguments. Returns limits, policy, default timeout, user-agent.

fetch_url

• url (string, required) — http:// or https:// only
• method (string, optional) — GET/POST/PUT/DELETE/HEAD/PATCH/OPTIONS (default GET)
• headers (object, optional) — {"content-type": "application/json", ...}
• body (string, optional) — request body as raw string; caller sets Content-Type
• max_bytes (integer, optional) — response cap. Default 5 MB, hard max 50 MB
• timeout_secs (integer, optional) — per-request timeout. Default 15s, max 120s
• allow_private (boolean, optional) — override SSRF guard. Default false

Returns {status, final_url, headers, content_type, truncated, bytes_read, body_text?, body_base64?}.

body_text is set for text-like content-types (text/*, json, xml, yaml, javascript) if UTF-8 decodable. Otherwise body_base64 is set and body_text is null.

Execution guidance

• Start with a small max_bytes (e.g. 100 000) when probing an unknown endpoint — you can always retry with a larger cap.
• Default timeout (15s) is fine for APIs; bump to 60–120s only for large files.
• If status is 4xx (-32002 error), the body preview is in the error message — read it before retrying.
• If status is 5xx (-32003), retries already exhausted inside the extension; do not retry from the LLM side — back off instead.
• blocked_host error (-32020) → the URL points to a private IP / loopback / metadata endpoint. Do not pass allow_private=true unless the operator explicitly asked to hit an internal service.
• truncated: true means the body was cut at max_bytes. Warn the user or re-fetch with a bigger cap if needed.
• For multi-step fetch-and-process, wrap the chain in TaskFlow so a restart doesn't re-fetch.

Common pipelines

URL → summary

1. fetch_url { url, max_bytes: 50000 }
2. summarize_text { text: body_text, length: "medium" }

URL → PDF → summary

1. fetch_url { url: "https://.../doc.pdf", max_bytes: 5000000 }
2. (operator saves body_base64 to /tmp/doc.pdf)
3. pdf-extract.extract_text { path: "/tmp/doc.pdf", max_chars: 50000 }
4. summarize_text { text, length: "long" }

(Auto-saving to disk from inside the LLM is not yet supported — a future extension fetch_url_save could do that safely.)