Skill

craigslist

Agent-native CLI for Craigslist — search, sync, and watch listings with a local SQLite snapshot history, cross-city aggregation, scam scoring (cross-city duplicate detection), and price-drift events. Emits NEW, PRICE-DROP, and SEED events instead of "any-listing-I- haven't-seen-yet." Free, no API key, no proxies, no PII selling. Read-only — does not post or manage accounts.

Verified: 2026-05-13 (printing-press-ingest-2026-05-13+enrich-capability-skill)

When to use craigslist

Choose if

You're driving Craigslist research / monitoring from an agent loop and want a free CLI that emits semantic events (NEW, PRICE-DROP, SEED) rather than raw HTML diffs, with cross-city scam scoring and a local snapshot history for price-drift reasoning. Prefer this over writing a Craigslist scraper yourself; the anti-bot handling and SAPI quirks (silent rejects on unknown hostnames) are already encoded.

Avoid if

You need to post or manage Craigslist accounts — that's out of scope for v1. Also avoid if your workload requires monitoring more than 3-5 cities in parallel; the README's own anti-bot guidance caps concurrency well below typical marketplace-aggregator scale.

Risk Flags

  • MEDIUM rate_limit Craigslist enforces an anti-bot threshold — exceeding it yields HTTP 403 with "Your request has been blocked"; recovery is "wait 30 minutes, then resume with longer poll intervals (--interval 5m or higher)." Cannot run parallel watches across more than 3-5 sites at once.
  • LOW scope "Posting and account management are intentionally out of scope for v1." CLI is search/sync/watch only — agents needing to create or manage Craigslist postings must use the Craigslist web UI.
  • LOW data_quality Silent failure mode: "sapi rejects requests against unknown hostnames silently." Agents must validate the configured hostname matches a real Craigslist city before relying on empty results.

Cost

Type: Free · Free tier: "Free, scriptable, no PII selling, no proxies, no API key" per upstream README. CLI binary is MIT-licensed. No upstream service fees — Craigslist itself doesn't charge for public listings access.

Install

Default

npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press install craigslist

Setup docs →

Estimated time to first success: ~5 min

Dependencies

Minimum runtime: Node.js (npx) or Go 1.26.3+ (source install)

Distribution

Repository
https://github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library
License
MIT