Introduction

A command line for Xiaohongshu.

xhs is a single binary. It speaks to xiaohongshu over plain HTTPS, shapes the responses into clean records, and gets out of your way. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to run alongside it.

How it is built

• A library package (xiaohongshu) holds the HTTP client and the typed data models. It paces requests, sets an honest User-Agent, and retries the transient failures any public site throws under load.
• A command tree (cli) wraps the library in subcommands with shared output formats and flags.
• One cmd/xhs entry point ties them together.
• The library also carries the parts specific to Xiaohongshu: a request signer (pkg/xhssign), an anonymous web session bootstrap, a server-rendered page reader (pkg/xhshtml), and the id, url, and xsec_token parser (pkg/xhsurl).

What works without a cookie

note and feed work anonymously from any IP. user, user --notes, and related work on a fresh IP at a slow pace and want a cookie for heavy use. comments, search, suggest, tag, and me need a logged-in cookie. Pass one with --cookie or XHS_COOKIE.

Scope

xhs is a read-only client over data xiaohongshu already serves publicly. It reads that data and shapes it for you. That narrow scope keeps it a single small binary with no database, no daemon, and no setup. The crawl command walks outward from the feed or seed notes and streams connected records to JSONL files. See the commands page for every command with sample input and output, and the quick start to get going.

Next: install it, then take the quick start.