Plasmate Quickstart — Python

A minimal template showing how to use Plasmate from Python. Fetch web pages and get back a structured Semantic Object Model (SOM) instead of raw HTML.

Prerequisites

Install Plasmate:

cargo install plasmate

What's Included

Script	Description
fetch_page.py	Fetch a single URL and print the semantic content
batch_fetch.py	Fetch multiple URLs and save results as JSON
extract_links.py	Extract all links from a page using the SOM

Quick Start

# Clone this template
gh repo create my-scraper --template plasmate-labs/quickstart-python --clone
cd my-scraper

# Fetch a page
python fetch_page.py https://news.ycombinator.com

# Extract links
python extract_links.py https://github.com/trending

# Batch fetch
python batch_fetch.py https://example.com https://example.org

How It Works

Plasmate fetches web pages and returns a Semantic Object Model — a structured JSON representation of the page content organized by semantic regions (navigation, main content, sidebars, etc.) and elements (headings, links, text, images).

import subprocess
import json

result = subprocess.run(["plasmate", "fetch", "https://example.com"], capture_output=True, text=True)
som = json.loads(result.stdout)

# som = {
#   "title": "Example Domain",
#   "lang": "en",
#   "regions": [
#     {
#       "role": "main",
#       "id": "content",
#       "elements": [
#         {"role": "heading", "text": "Example Domain", "level": 1},
#         {"role": "text", "text": "This domain is for use in illustrative examples..."},
#         {"role": "link", "text": "More information...", "href": "https://www.iana.org/domains/example"}
#       ]
#     }
#   ]
# }

License

MIT