huggingface/smolagents · error · ImportError

You must install packages `markdownify` and `requests` to ru

Error message

You must install packages `markdownify` and `requests` to run this tool: for instance run `pip install markdownify requests`.

What it means

Raised by VisitWebPageTool.forward when markdownify or requests cannot be imported. The tool fetches a URL and converts HTML to markdown, both optional dependencies, so it raises ImportError (chained from the underlying failure) instead of degrading silently.

Source

Thrown at src/smolagents/default_tools.py:523

        super().__init__()
        self.max_output_length = max_output_length

    def _truncate_content(self, content: str, max_length: int) -> str:
        if len(content) <= max_length:
            return content
        return (
            content[:max_length] + f"\n..._This content has been truncated to stay below {max_length} characters_...\n"
        )

    def forward(self, url: str) -> str:
        try:
            import re

            import requests
            from markdownify import markdownify
            from requests.exceptions import RequestException
        except ImportError as e:
            raise ImportError(
                "You must install packages `markdownify` and `requests` to run this tool: for instance run `pip install markdownify requests`."
            ) from e
        try:
            # Send a GET request to the URL with a 20-second timeout
            response = requests.get(url, timeout=20)
            response.raise_for_status()  # Raise an exception for bad status codes

            # Convert the HTML content to Markdown
            markdown_content = markdownify(response.text).strip()

            # Remove multiple line breaks
            markdown_content = re.sub(r"\n{3,}", "\n\n", markdown_content)

            return self._truncate_content(markdown_content, self.max_output_length)

        except requests.exceptions.Timeout:
            return "The request timed out. Please try again later or check the URL."
        except RequestException as e:

View on GitHub (pinned to 30bb116109)

Solutions

1. pip install markdownify requests (or the relevant smolagents extras).
2. Add both to your project's pinned dependencies so environments stay reproducible.
3. Verify with `python -c "import markdownify, requests"` in the same environment that runs the agent.

Example fix

# before
visit_webpage.run('https://example.com')  # ImportError
# after
# pip install markdownify requests
visit_webpage.run('https://example.com')

try:
    import markdownify, requests  # noqa
except ImportError:
    raise SystemExit('pip install markdownify requests')

When it happens

Trigger: Calling visit_webpage.run(url) in an environment lacking markdownify or requests. The import happens inside forward, so construction succeeds and the error only appears on first use.

Common situations: Base smolagents install without extras, lean Docker images, CI caching that drops optional deps after a smolagents upgrade.

Understand the failure class

Background: "X is not installed. Please install it with pip install Y": missing optional dependency errors — ImportError/ValueError raised when a library's optional extra was never installed — this error's family across 22 libraries.

Related errors

• You must install package `ddgs` to run this tool: for instan
• You must install `wikipedia-api` to run this tool: for insta
• Error during jinja template rendering: {type(e).__name__}: {
• Cannot specify both 'messages' and 'steps' parameters. Use '
• The 'system_prompt' property is read-only. Use 'self.prompt_

AI-assisted analysis of huggingface/smolagents@30bb116109 (2026-08-28). Data as JSON: /api/errors/e3e8d93b76a82d11. Report an issue: GitHub.