How Supacrawler Enhances Hikari Projects - A Showcase

When you start a SaaS app using Hikari—Next.js 14 + Supabase + Stripe + Tailwind—you get a strong foundation: authentication, subscription billing, dashboards, docs/blog support, UI scaffolding.

But often, you’ll also want to bring in external content, monitor page changes, or extract structured data from other sites. That’s where Supacrawler becomes a natural companion.

Below is how Supacrawler adds value to Hikari-based projects, some use-cases, what implementing it looks like, and why this combo works well.

What Supacrawler Brings to the Table

Here are the capabilities Supacrawler provides that Hikari doesn't include out of the box:

Extracting and transforming content from external sources (blogs, documentation) via REST API endpoints like /scrape and /crawl.
Full-page screenshots and previews (with JS rendering) using /screenshots.
Monitoring external pages for updates using /watch — useful for changelogs, compliance, or competitive tracking.
Affordable and performant crawling jobs with asynchronous processing, backed by Redis + Asynq. Supacrawler documentation confirms its focus on cost-effectiveness and stability.

Example Workflows When You Combine Hikari + Supacrawler

These are practical scenarios showing how developers using Hikari could plug in Supacrawler to extend their app:

Workflow	How Supacrawler Is Used	Why It Helps
Content Imports	Use the `/crawl` endpoint to harvest external blog or docs content, convert it to Markdown/JSON, and integrate into Hikari’s blog or knowledge sections.	Lets you aggregate content without manually copying/pasting, or writing scraping logic. Keeps content up-to-date automatically.
Change Alerts & Monitoring	For pages that matter (competitor pricing, external docs, regulatory sites), schedule `/watch` jobs; then show flagged changes in dashboards or send email/webhooks.	Great for SaaS apps that need real-world signals or timely updates. Reactive rather than manual.
Visual Previews / Archiving	When users supply URLs to display content previews (e.g. link previews, snapshots), use `/screenshots`.	Improves UI / UX; gives a visual way to confirm content, not just text.
Data-Driven Features	Build features like content search, enrichment (extract metadata, links, images) using `/scrape` and `/crawl`. For example, combining scraped documentation with your own content search powered by Supabase + vector embeddings.	Adds value-added features (search, recommendation) without heavy scraping infrastructure.

How to Integrate Supacrawler with Hikari

Here’s a mental sketch of how you’d wire them up:

API Key / Service Setup
Deploy or use Supacrawler (locally or hosted), get API key, set environment variables in your Hikari project to point to Supacrawler endpoints (e.g., SUPACRAWLER_API_URL, SUPACRAWLER_KEY).
Create Utility Modules
In Hikari, write small service modules (JS/TypeScript) that call Supacrawler’s /scrape, /crawl, etc. Maybe utilities like fetchExternalBlogContent(), watchPageDifferences(), generatePreviewScreenshot().
UI / Backend Hooks
- Backend server side (Next.js API routes) to process the Supacrawler jobs, handle responses.
- Frontend UI components to display previews, show status of monitoring, or content fetched.
- Use dashboards in Hikari to show external content, maybe with filters or schedule.
Configuration Choices
- Depth of crawl, link limits, and whether JS rendering is needed (these affect performance).
- How frequently to watch pages.
- Storage of screenshots / scraped content (store in Supabase Storage or other storage).
- Error handling & retries.

To showcase Supacrawler in real-world workflows, here are some tutorials I’ve published:

These examples highlight how Supacrawler can be used to build AI-ready pipelines, monitor critical web pages, and retrieve structured content at scale.