rsearch

Reddit Search

Search Reddit posts through the browser: a background tab opens www.reddit.com, then a same-origin fetch('/search.json?…', { credentials: 'include' }) hits reddit's own JSON listing endpoint with the browser's cookies, UA, and referer. Adapted from opencli's clis/reddit/search.js. No Reddit API key, no OAuth app, no scraping selectors — the response is reddit's canonical listing JSON. Each call opens its own tab and WebSocket session — safe for parallel use.

Usage

rsearch "claude code"                                 # up to 15 results, pretty
rsearch "local llm" 5                                 # 5 results
rsearch --json "stable diffusion" 10                  # raw JSON array
rsearch --subreddit programming "git tips"            # within one subreddit (r/ prefix optional)
rsearch --sort top --time week "browser automation"   # sort + time filter

rsearch "rust async" 3 &                              # parallel-safe
rsearch "go channels" 3 &
wait

Flag	Values	Default
--json	—	pretty text
--subreddit NAME	bare name, r/name, or /r/name	all of reddit
--sort S	relevance hot top new comments	relevance
--time T	all hour day week month year	all
positional 2	count, 1–100	15

Result shape

--json returns an array of posts, adapted 1:1 from opencli's column set:

[
  {
    "id": "1abc2de",
    "title": "Show r/programming: …",
    "subreddit": "r/programming",
    "author": "someuser",
    "score": 1234,
    "comments": 210,
    "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1abc2de/…",
    "created_utc": 1735689600,
    "selftext": "…",
    "post_hint": "link",
    "url_overridden_by_dest": "https://example.com/article",
    "preview_image_url": "https://preview.redd.it/…",
    "gallery_urls": []
  }
]

Link posts carry the external target in url_overridden_by_dest (pretty output prints it after ->); galleries list direct i.redd.it images in gallery_urls.

Traps

• Ask via the page, not from Node. Server-side fetch/curl of reddit.com/search.json gets bot-walled or cookie-less default results. The in-page fetch runs with the browser's reddit cookies and real UA on a committed reddit.com origin — that's the whole trick. A logged-in session is used automatically; logged-out searches silently filter NSFW results.
• Don't waitFor('networkIdle') on reddit. The SPA polls continuously, so the 500 ms quiet window may never open. The script waits for the Page.frameNavigated commit (which fires regardless) plus a short document.readyState poll — the fetch only needs the committed origin, not a fully-built page.
• Bound the page-side fetch. CDP calls have no built-in timeout; the eval is raced against a 20 s node-side timeout so a hung reddit request fails instead of leaking the tab.
• Non-JSON or non-200 responses surface as errors, not empty results — e.g. HTTP 403: Blocked or a "non-JSON response … block or login wall" message. This fires only after the CLI has already retried twice with backoff: a fresh cookie jar's first /search.json hit gets a 403 interstitial whose response sets the cookies that make the retry pass, so a persistent failure means real rate-limiting — wait a bit or check the login state.
• Result count can be below count. Reddit caps limit at 100 (the CLI clamps too) and often returns fewer, especially inside small subreddits.
• Multi-flag ordering: flags go before the query (rsearch --sort top --time week "query"), matching gmaps.