How to integrate Zenrows MCP with Codex

Codex is one of the most popular coding harnesses out there. And MCP makes the experience even better. With Zenrows MCP integration, you can draft, triage, summarise emails, and much more, all without leaving the terminal or the app, whichever you prefer.

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Api Key

ZenRows is a web scraping API that helps you gather structured data from dynamic and protected websites. It makes extracting web data easy by bypassing CAPTCHAs and anti-bot measures.

14 Tools

Introduction

Codex is one of the most popular coding harnesses out there. And MCP makes the experience even better. With Zenrows MCP integration, you can draft, triage, summarise emails, and much more, all without leaving the terminal or the app, whichever you prefer.

Also integrate Zenrows with

Why use Composio?

Apart from a managed and hosted MCP server, you will get:

  • CodeAct: A dedicated workbench that allows GPT to write its code to handle complex tool chaining. Reduces to-and-fro with LLMs for frequent tool calling.
  • Large tool responses: Handle them to minimise context rot.
  • Dynamic just-in-time access to 20,000 tools across 1000+ other Apps for cross-app workflows. It loads the tools you need, so GPTs aren't overwhelmed by tools you don't need.

How to install Zenrows MCP in Codex

Run the setup command

Run this command in your terminal to add the Composio MCP server to Codex.

Terminal

It will initiate the authentication in a browser window, authorize Codex to access your Composio account.

Composio authentication page

(Optional) Authenticate with OAuth

To authenticate manually, run the login command to open a browser window and authorize Codex to access your Composio account.

bash
codex mcp login composio

Verify the connection

Run codex mcp list to confirm Composio appears as a registered MCP server.

bash
codex mcp list

Codex App

Codex App follows the same approach as VS Code.

  1. Click ⚙️ on the bottom left → MCP Servers → + Add servers → Streamable HTTP:
  2. Fill the header and Key fields with { "x-consumer-api-key" = "ck_*******" }.
  3. The Key is the Composio API key, that you can find on dashboard.composio.dev
  4. Click on Authenticate and authorize Codex to your Composio account and you're all set.
Codex App MCP setup
  1. Restart and verify if it's there in .codex/config.toml
bash
[mcp_servers.composio]
url = "https://connect.composio.dev/mcp"
http_headers = { "x-consumer-api-key" = "ck_*******" }

What is the Zenrows MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The Zenrows MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your Zenrows account. It provides structured and secure access to advanced web scraping capabilities, so your agent can extract structured data, bypass CAPTCHAs, convert pages to PDF, and monitor your API usage on your behalf.

  • Intelligent web data extraction: Direct your agent to scrape and extract plain text or structured data from dynamic websites, including specialized real estate property data from platforms like Zillow or Idealista.
  • PDF and content generation: Ask your agent to convert any web page into a PDF or retrieve clean, formatted plain text for archiving, documentation, or offline reading.
  • Seamless CAPTCHA and block bypassing: Enable your agent to gather data from sites protected by CAPTCHAs or anti-bot systems without manual intervention.
  • Real-time API usage monitoring: Have the agent check your account’s current API usage, concurrency status, and limits to help manage credits and avoid interruptions.
  • Session and compression management: Instruct your agent to maintain consistent scraping sessions, handle compression to optimize bandwidth, and retrieve detailed response headers for debugging and performance optimization.

Conclusion

You've successfully integrated Zenrows with Codex using Composio's MCP server. Now you can interact with Zenrows directly from your terminal, VS Code, or the Codex App using natural language commands.

Key benefits of this setup:

  • Seamless integration across CLI, VS Code, and standalone app
  • Natural language commands for Zenrows operations
  • Managed authentication through Composio
  • Access to 20,000+ tools across 1000+ apps for cross-app workflows
  • CodeAct workbench for complex tool chaining

Next steps:

  • Try asking Codex to perform various Zenrows operations
  • Explore cross-app workflows by connecting more toolkits
  • Build automation scripts that leverage Codex's AI capabilities
TOOLS

Supported Tools

Every Zenrows action and event your agent gets out of the box.

Get ZenRows API Usage Statistics

This tool retrieves the current API usage statistics and limits for your ZenRows account.

Get Detailed Concurrency Status

This tool provides detailed information about the current concurrency status and limits of your ZenRows account by making a request to the API and analyzing the response headers.

Get Original Status Code

This tool retrieves the original HTTP status code returned by the target website, which is useful for debugging purposes.

Get PDF from URL

This tool generates a PDF version of the scraped content from a given URL.

Get Plaintext Response

This tool extracts plain text content from a webpage using the ZenRows API.

Get Real Estate Property Data

A specialized tool for extracting structured data from real estate platforms like Zillow and Idealista.

Get Response with Compression

A tool to fetch content from a URL using the ZenRows API with compression enabled to optimize bandwidth usage and improve performance.

Get response headers

A tool to retrieve and parse response headers from ZenRows API requests.

Get Session ID

This tool implements ZenRows' session management functionality to maintain the same IP address across multiple requests for up to 10 minutes.

Get Walmart Product Details

This tool allows users to extract detailed product information from Walmart using ZenRows' specialized e-commerce scraping API.

Scrape url autoparse

The ZENROWS_SCRAPE_URL_AUTOPARSE tool automatically parses and extracts structured data from any given URL using intelligent parsing capabilities.

Scrape URL HTML

This tool extracts raw HTML data from a given URL using ZenRows' Universal Scraper API.

Scrape URL with CSS Selectors

This tool allows users to scrape specific elements from a webpage using CSS selectors.

Screenshot URL

A tool to capture screenshots of web pages using ZenRows API.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

With a standalone Zenrows MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of Zenrows tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from Zenrows and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Yes, you can. Codex fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right Zenrows tools.

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which Zenrows scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your Zenrows data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

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