Introduction

Weibo is one of the largest social platforms in China: trending topics, posts, comments, user profiles, and timelines, all behind a web frontend that talks to a JSON API. That API is public in the sense that your browser uses it every time you load a page, but it is not built to be called by hand.

weibo closes that gap. It is a single binary that treats Weibo the way curl treats a web server: you ask for something by its id or URL, it fetches exactly that, and it hands you a clean structured record.

What the API looks like

Almost every endpoint returns the same envelope:

{ "ok": 1, "data": { ... } }

A value of 1 means success and data carries the payload. A value of -100 means the surface requires a logged-in session. weibo maps those codes to clear exit statuses, so you know exactly what went wrong.

Two hosts, different headers

Weibo's API is split across two hosts:

• weibo.com — hot search board and search suggestions. Needs desktop Chrome headers and Referer: https://weibo.com/.
• m.weibo.cn — post detail, comments, user profiles, and timelines. Needs mobile Safari headers plus MWeibo-Pwa: 1 and X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest.

weibo handles that routing for you based on which command you run.

What the six commands read

Command	Endpoint	Needs cookie?
hot	weibo.com/ajax/side/hotSearch	no
status	m.weibo.cn/statuses/show	no
comments	m.weibo.cn/comments/hotflow	no
suggest	weibo.com/ajax/side/search	no
user	m.weibo.cn/api/container/getIndex?containerid=100505{uid}	yes
posts	m.weibo.cn/api/container/getIndex?containerid=107603{uid}	yes

The four open commands work without any account. The two gated commands return ok:-100 for anonymous callers — pass your browser SUB cookie with --cookie or WEIBO_COOKIE to reach them.

What weibo cleans up for you

HTML in post text. Post bodies contain <a>, <span>, and <br /> tags. weibo replaces line-break tags with spaces, strips all other HTML tags, and collapses whitespace into clean readable text.

Timestamps. Weibo timestamps arrive as "Mon Jun 15 09:05:12 +0800 2026". weibo normalizes them to "2006-01-02 15:04:05" UTC.

ID forms. status, comments accept a bare numeric id or any of the common URL forms: m.weibo.cn/detail/ID, m.weibo.cn/status/ID. user, posts accept a bare uid or weibo.com/u/UID, m.weibo.cn/u/UID, m.weibo.cn/profile/UID.

Retries. On 429 or 5xx the client backs off (500ms per attempt, capped at 5s) and retries up to --retries times (default 3).

What weibo is not

weibo is a read-only client. It does not log in for you, post, or vote. It reads the public data and shapes it. That narrow scope is what keeps it a single small binary with no database, no daemon, and no setup.

Next: install it, then take the quick start.