How to integrate WebCrawlerAPI MCP with OpenAI Agents SDK

This guide walks you through connecting WebCrawlerAPI to the OpenAI Agents SDK using the Composio tool router. By the end, you'll have a working WebCrawlerAPI agent that can scrape web pages, start site crawls, monitor feed changes, manage feeds, and check costs through natural language commands. This guide will help you understand how to give your OpenAI Agents SDK agent real control over a WebCrawlerAPI account through Composio's WebCrawlerAPI MCP server. Before we dive in, let's take a quick look at the key ideas and tools involved.

WebCrawlerAPI logoWebCrawlerAPI
Api Key

WebCrawlerAPI is a unified API for crawling websites, scraping pages, running AI web agents, and monitoring website feeds. It helps you extract fresh web data without building crawler infrastructure yourself.

10 Tools

Introduction

This guide walks you through connecting WebCrawlerAPI to the OpenAI Agents SDK using the Composio tool router. By the end, you'll have a working WebCrawlerAPI agent that can scrape web pages, start site crawls, monitor feed changes, manage feeds, and check costs through natural language commands.

This guide will help you understand how to give your OpenAI Agents SDK agent real control over a WebCrawlerAPI account through Composio's WebCrawlerAPI MCP server.

Before we dive in, let's take a quick look at the key ideas and tools involved.

Also integrate WebCrawlerAPI with

TL;DR

Here's what you'll learn:
  • Get and set up your OpenAI and Composio API keys
  • Install the necessary dependencies
  • Initialize Composio and create a Tool Router session for WebCrawlerAPI
  • Configure an AI agent that can use WebCrawlerAPI as a tool
  • Run a live chat session where you can ask the agent to perform WebCrawlerAPI operations

What is OpenAI Agents SDK?

The OpenAI Agents SDK is a lightweight framework for building AI agents that can use tools and maintain conversation state. It provides a simple interface for creating agents with hosted MCP tool support.

Key features include:

  • Hosted MCP Tools: Connect to external services through hosted MCP endpoints
  • SQLite Sessions: Persist conversation history across interactions
  • Simple API: Clean interface with Agent, Runner, and tool configuration
  • Streaming Support: Real-time response streaming for interactive applications

What is the WebCrawlerAPI MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The WebCrawlerAPI MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your WebCrawlerAPI account. It provides structured and secure access to website crawling, page scraping, monitored feeds, and usage data, so your agent can crawl sites, extract page content, monitor website changes, manage feeds, and review costs on your behalf.

  • Website crawling: Have your agent start site crawls and check their progress, page results, errors, and observed costs.
  • Page scraping and extraction: Direct your agent to scrape a web page and return its content or structured information.
  • Website change monitoring: Let the agent create recurring feeds and review detected changes and recent monitoring activity.
  • Feed management: Instruct your agent to list monitored feeds, inspect their status, pause or resume monitoring, and permanently cancel feeds.
  • Usage and cost tracking: Have your agent check your available balance, request volume, and usage costs for a chosen date range.

What is the Composio tool router, and how does it fit here?

What is Composio SDK?

Composio's Composio SDK helps agents find the right tools for a task at runtime. You can plug in multiple toolkits (like Gmail, HubSpot, and GitHub), and the agent will identify the relevant app and action to complete multi-step workflows. This can reduce token usage and improve the reliability of tool calls. Read more here: Getting started with Composio SDK

The tool router generates a secure MCP URL that your agents can access to perform actions.

How the Composio SDK works

The Composio SDK follows a three-phase workflow:

  1. Discovery: Searches for tools matching your task and returns relevant toolkits with their details.
  2. Authentication: Checks for active connections. If missing, creates an auth config and returns a connection URL via Auth Link.
  3. Execution: Executes the action using the authenticated connection.

Step-by-step Guide

Step by step09 STEPS
1

Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have:
  • Composio API Key and OpenAI API Key
  • Primary know-how of OpenAI Agents SDK
  • A live WebCrawlerAPI project
  • Some knowledge of Python or Typescript
2

Getting API Keys for OpenAI and Composio

OpenAI API Key
  • Go to the OpenAI dashboard and create an API key. You'll need credits to use the models, or you can connect to another model provider.
  • Keep the API key safe.
Composio API Key
3

Install dependencies

npm install @composio/openai-agents @openai/agents dotenv

Install the Composio SDK and the OpenAI Agents SDK.

4

Set up environment variables

bash
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...your-api-key
COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your-api-key
USER_ID=composio_user@gmail.com

Create a .env file and add your OpenAI and Composio API keys.

5

Import dependencies

import 'dotenv/config';
import { Composio } from '@composio/core';
import { OpenAIAgentsProvider } from '@composio/openai-agents';
import { Agent, hostedMcpTool, run, OpenAIConversationsSession } from '@openai/agents';
import * as readline from 'readline';
What's happening:
  • You're importing all necessary libraries.
  • The Composio and OpenAIAgentsProvider classes are imported to connect your OpenAI agent to Composio tools like WebCrawlerAPI.
6

Set up the Composio instance

dotenv.config();

const composioApiKey = process.env.COMPOSIO_API_KEY;
const userId = process.env.USER_ID;

if (!composioApiKey) {
  throw new Error('COMPOSIO_API_KEY is not set. Create a .env file with COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your_key');
}
if (!userId) {
  throw new Error('USER_ID is not set');
}

// Initialize Composio
const composio = new Composio({
  apiKey: composioApiKey,
  provider: new OpenAIAgentsProvider(),
});
What's happening:
  • dotenv.config() loads your .env file so COMPOSIO_API_KEY and USER_ID are available as environment variables.
  • Creating a Composio instance using the API Key and OpenAIAgentsProvider class.
7

Create a Tool Router session

// Create Tool Router session for WebCrawlerAPI
const session = await composio.create(userId as string, {
  toolkits: ['webcrawlerapi'],
});
const mcpUrl = session.mcp.url;

What is happening:

  • You give the Tool Router the user id and the toolkits you want available. Here, it is only webcrawlerapi.
  • The router checks the user's WebCrawlerAPI connection and prepares the MCP endpoint.
  • The returned session.mcp.url is the MCP URL that your agent will use to access WebCrawlerAPI.
  • This approach keeps things lightweight and lets the agent request WebCrawlerAPI tools only when needed during the conversation.
8

Configure the agent

// Configure agent with MCP tool
const agent = new Agent({
  name: 'Assistant',
  model: 'gpt-5',
  instructions:
    'You are a helpful assistant that can access WebCrawlerAPI. Help users perform WebCrawlerAPI operations through natural language.',
  tools: [
    hostedMcpTool({
      serverLabel: 'tool_router',
      serverUrl: mcpUrl,
      headers: { 'x-api-key': composioApiKey },
      requireApproval: 'never',
    }),
  ],
});
What's happening:
  • We're creating an Agent instance with a name, model (gpt-5), and clear instructions about its purpose.
  • The agent's instructions tell it that it can access WebCrawlerAPI and help with queries, inserts, updates, authentication, and fetching database information.
  • The tools array includes a hostedMcpTool that connects to the MCP server URL we created earlier.
  • The headers object includes the Composio API key for secure authentication with the MCP server.
  • requireApproval: 'never' means the agent can execute WebCrawlerAPI operations without asking for permission each time, making interactions smoother.
9

Start chat loop and handle conversation

// Keep conversation state across turns
const conversationSession = new OpenAIConversationsSession();

// Simple CLI
const rl = readline.createInterface({
  input: process.stdin,
  output: process.stdout,
  prompt: 'You: ',
});

console.log('\nComposio Tool Router session created.');
console.log('\nChat started. Type your requests below.');
console.log("Commands: 'exit', 'quit', or 'q' to end\n");

try {
  const first = await run(agent, 'What can you help me with?', { session: conversationSession });
  console.log(`Assistant: ${first.finalOutput}\n`);
} catch (e) {
  console.error('Error:', e instanceof Error ? e.message : e, '\n');
}

rl.prompt();

rl.on('line', async (userInput) => {
  const text = userInput.trim();

  if (['exit', 'quit', 'q'].includes(text.toLowerCase())) {
    console.log('Goodbye!');
    rl.close();
    process.exit(0);
  }

  if (!text) {
    rl.prompt();
    return;
  }

  try {
    const result = await run(agent, text, { session: conversationSession });
    console.log(`\nAssistant: ${result.finalOutput}\n`);
  } catch (e) {
    console.error('Error:', e instanceof Error ? e.message : e, '\n');
  }

  rl.prompt();
});

rl.on('close', () => {
  console.log('\n👋 Session ended.');
  process.exit(0);
});
What's happening:
  • The program prints a session URL that you visit to authorize WebCrawlerAPI.
  • After authorization, the chat begins.
  • Each message you type is processed by the agent using run().
  • The responses are printed to the console.
  • Typing exit, quit, or q cleanly ends the chat.

Complete Code

Here's the complete code to get you started with WebCrawlerAPI and OpenAI Agents SDK:

import 'dotenv/config';
import { Composio } from '@composio/core';
import { OpenAIAgentsProvider } from '@composio/openai-agents';
import { Agent, hostedMcpTool, run, OpenAIConversationsSession } from '@openai/agents';
import * as readline from 'readline';

const composioApiKey = process.env.COMPOSIO_API_KEY;
const userId = process.env.USER_ID;

if (!composioApiKey) {
  throw new Error('COMPOSIO_API_KEY is not set. Create a .env file with COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your_key');
}
if (!userId) {
  throw new Error('USER_ID is not set');
}

// Initialize Composio
const composio = new Composio({
  apiKey: composioApiKey,
  provider: new OpenAIAgentsProvider(),
});

async function main() {
  // Create Tool Router session
  const session = await composio.create(userId as string, {
    toolkits: ['webcrawlerapi'],
  });
  const mcpUrl = session.mcp.url;

  // Configure agent with MCP tool
  const agent = new Agent({
    name: 'Assistant',
    model: 'gpt-5',
    instructions:
      'You are a helpful assistant that can access WebCrawlerAPI. Help users perform WebCrawlerAPI operations through natural language.',
    tools: [
      hostedMcpTool({
        serverLabel: 'tool_router',
        serverUrl: mcpUrl,
        headers: { 'x-api-key': composioApiKey },
        requireApproval: 'never',
      }),
    ],
  });

  // Keep conversation state across turns
  const conversationSession = new OpenAIConversationsSession();

  // Simple CLI
  const rl = readline.createInterface({
    input: process.stdin,
    output: process.stdout,
    prompt: 'You: ',
  });

  console.log('\nComposio Tool Router session created.');
  console.log('\nChat started. Type your requests below.');
  console.log("Commands: 'exit', 'quit', or 'q' to end\n");

  try {
    const first = await run(agent, 'What can you help me with?', { session: conversationSession });
    console.log(`Assistant: ${first.finalOutput}\n`);
  } catch (e) {
    console.error('Error:', e instanceof Error ? e.message : e, '\n');
  }

  rl.prompt();

  rl.on('line', async (userInput) => {
    const text = userInput.trim();

    if (['exit', 'quit', 'q'].includes(text.toLowerCase())) {
      console.log('Goodbye!');
      rl.close();
      process.exit(0);
    }

    if (!text) {
      rl.prompt();
      return;
    }

    try {
      const result = await run(agent, text, { session: conversationSession });
      console.log(`\nAssistant: ${result.finalOutput}\n`);
    } catch (e) {
      console.error('Error:', e instanceof Error ? e.message : e, '\n');
    }

    rl.prompt();
  });

  rl.on('close', () => {
    console.log('\nSession ended.');
    process.exit(0);
  });
}

main().catch((err) => {
  console.error('Fatal error:', err);
  process.exit(1);
});

Conclusion

This was a starter code for integrating WebCrawlerAPI MCP with OpenAI Agents SDK to build a functional AI agent that can interact with WebCrawlerAPI.

Key features:

  • Hosted MCP tool integration through Composio's Tool Router
  • SQLite session persistence for conversation history
  • Simple async chat loop for interactive testing
You can extend this by adding more toolkits, implementing custom business logic, or building a web interface around the agent.
TOOLS

Supported Tools

Every WebCrawlerAPI action and event your agent gets out of the box.

Create Crawl

Start a metered asynchronous crawl over a site and return its job ID.

Create Feed

Create a recurring website-change feed.

Delete Feed

Permanently cancel a feed so it cannot be resumed.

Get Crawl Job

Get a crawl job's status, configuration, per-page results, content URLs, errors, and observed costs.

Get Feed

Get one feed's configuration, lifecycle status, and recent run history, including per-run crawl counts and cost.

Get Organization Costs

Return current spendable balance plus request count and USD usage for a date range.

List Feed Changes

Return one page of detected feed changes as structured JSON, with an opaque continuation cursor for older pages.

List Feeds

List active and paused feeds for the connected organization, newest first.

Scrape Page

Scrape one web page synchronously and return requested content or structured extraction.

Set Feed State

Pause an active feed's future scheduled runs or resume a paused feed.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

With a standalone WebCrawlerAPI MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of WebCrawlerAPI tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from WebCrawlerAPI and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Yes, you can. OpenAI Agents SDK fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right WebCrawlerAPI tools.

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which WebCrawlerAPI scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your WebCrawlerAPI data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

Start with WebCrawlerAPI.It takes 30 seconds.

Managed auth, hosted MCP servers, and every WebCrawlerAPI tool your agent needs.Free to start.

Start building