Crawl a site into a sandbox
Turn a URL into a browsable replica Rendemo hosts, with no recording — including pages behind a login, by sharing your browser session from the extension.
What a sandbox is
A sandbox is a browsable copy of a real site that Rendemo builds by visiting it with a headless browser and keeping the markup of each page. No recording, no extension, no access to the source: you give it a URL and get back a replica hosted at a Rendemo address.
It exists so you can build a tour of a product you cannot instrument — a prospect's site, a competitor's, your own marketing pages — and so a viewer can click through it without touching the real thing. A sandbox tour writes no markers into anybody's source; each step records what its target element looks like and a build pass finds it again every time the sandbox is rebuilt.
A sandbox is a still, not a film
The crawler visits each page and keeps what it finds. It does not click, type or open menus, so anything that only exists after an interaction — a dialog, a dropdown, an expanded row — is not in the replica. Record with the extension when you need those.Crawling a site
From an agent, rendemo_crawl_site takes the URL and returns a job to poll. The crawl takes a few minutes and the sandbox build takes several more, so expect to wait — 40 pages took about four minutes in production.
{ "url": "https://example.com/" }By default it discovers pages from the site's sitemap.xml. The URL you pass is always visited too, path and all. To crawl an exact set of pages instead — which skips discovery entirely — name them:
{
"url": "https://example.com/dashboard",
"urls": [
"https://example.com/dashboard/settings",
"https://example.com/dashboard/billing"
]
}Naming URLs is the only way to reach a signed-in area, because no product lists its dashboard in a sitemap. The page budget is raised to fit the list, so a page you named is never dropped in favour of one the crawler found.
The sandbox is not published
A finished crawl is a draft. Authoring and checking a tour work on it as it is; publishing is a separate, deliberate step that makes every page in the replica world-visible to anyone with the URL.When a crawl comes back wrong
| What you see | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| No sitemap found, or refused | The site rate-limits or blocks automated requests. It often serves the sitemap fine to a real browser, so check it yourself before believing the error — then crawl with an explicit urls list, which needs no sitemap. |
| Every page is the same 'verifying your browser' page | A bot check challenged the crawler and every page captured the challenge instead. These are usually rate-based: wait, then crawl again, and space crawls of that site out rather than retrying immediately. |
| Pages came back but the signed-in ones are login screens | No session, an expired one, or one shared from a different origin. Re-share it and check the crawl reports authenticated: true. |
| Fewer pages than you asked for | Pages whose markup is identical collapse into one, since two copies of the same screen are not two pages. A page missing entirely was either dropped as a login wall or never reachable from the sitemap. |
A crawl can be re-run against the same project, which keeps the sandbox's id and address so tours already pointing at it keep working. It replaces the pages, so re-crawl into a new project instead when the current replica is still the best copy you have.