First 5 Minutes with Capcat

Get Capcat running and collect your first articles in under 5 minutes.

What You'll Learn

• Install Capcat on your OS
• Run your first article fetch
• Understand the output structure

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8 or higher
• Internet connection
• 5 minutes of time

Step 1: Install Capcat

macOS

pip install capcat

Windows

pip install capcat

Linux (Ubuntu / Debian)

Ubuntu and Debian block system-wide pip installs. Use pipx instead:

sudo apt install pipx
pipx install capcat

Verify

capcat list sources

Expected output: a list of available sources (Hacker News, BBC, Guardian, etc.).

Step 2: Your First Fetch

Collect 5 articles from Hacker News:

capcat fetch hn --count 5

You'll see:

Processing hn articles...
[Progress indicators]
Successfully processed 5 articles

Step 3: Check Your Results

Articles are saved in:

../News/news_DD-MM-YYYY/Hacker_News_DD-MM-YYYY/

Each article is in its own folder:

Step 4: Try a Single Article

Grab a specific article by URL:

capcat single https://example.com/article

Result saved in:

../Capcats/cc_DD-MM-YYYY-Article-Title/

What Just Happened?

You ran Capcat in two modes:

• fetch

  - Collect from a news source

• single

  - Grab one specific article

Capcat automatically:

• Downloaded article content
• Converted HTML to clean Markdown
• Downloaded and embedded images
• Organized everything by date and source

Next Steps

Ready for more?

• Daily News Collection - Set up your routine
• Interactive Mode - Use the visual menu

Need technical details?

• CLI Commands Comprehensive - Every command option documented

Quick Reference

# Fetch articles
capcat fetch SOURCE --count N

# Fetch with HTML
capcat fetch SOURCE --count N --html

# Grab single article
capcat single URL

# List available sources
capcat list sources

# Interactive menu
capcat catch