Trello - boards and lists

Read-only pattern for Trello: land on a board URL, scrape lists and their cards. Works for signed-in agents that inherit Tom's Chrome session - no login dance, no captcha.

URL patterns

• https://trello.com/ - marketing home for anonymous; when signed in, redirects to https://trello.com/u/<username>/boards (the dashboard). Note: https://trello.com/boards (no /u/<username>) returns an error page for signed-in users. Always route via /u/<username>/boards.
• Board URL: https://trello.com/b/<8-char-boardId>/<slug>. The slug is cosmetic - the boardId is the canonical identifier.
• Card URL: https://trello.com/c/<8-char-cardId>/<n>-<slug>, where <n> is the card's 1-based position within its list at creation time.

Stable selectors

• List: [data-testid="list"] - or [data-list-id] for the id. Returns exactly the lists on the board, no sidebar noise.
• List header: within a list, [data-testid="list-header-name"]. Falling back to h2 inside the list also works, but the board's outer chrome has h2s too (sidebar plans etc.) - stay scoped to the list element.
• Card: a[href*="/c/"] - scoped to each list element. The href is the canonical link; the visible text is the card name.
• Card name within the anchor: [data-testid="card-name"]. Anchor innerText is a reasonable fallback.

Site structure

The board page is a single-page React app. All lists render in one pass into horizontally scrolling columns. Cards within a list are vertical. Count via document.querySelectorAll('[data-testid="list"]').length - matches the visible column count.

Framework / interaction quirks

• goto_url('https://trello.com/') redirects asynchronously to the user's boards dashboard. After wait_for_load(), the URL in page_info() will be .../u/<username>/boards. Don't hard-code the username; read it back from page_info()['url'] if you need it.
• On initial load the board's lists can take ~1-2 s to render after wait_for_load() returns. A brief time.sleep(2) before scraping is reliable; alternatively, wait for [data-testid="list"] to be present with a count > 0.

Waits

• wait_for_load() on the board URL returns before all lists/cards are in the DOM. The list containers appear first (empty), then cards populate. Wait for a non-zero card count inside a list before declaring "done".

Traps

• A board user-link scrape (a[href^="/b/"]) on the dashboard returns each board twice (recent + starred/all). Deduplicate by href.
• Sidebar h2 headings include plan names ("Standard", "Premium") - don't treat them as list names. Scope header reads to elements inside [data-testid="list"].

Read-only, one-hit scrape (JS-as-extract, fast path)

(() => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('[data-testid="list"]'))
  .map(list => ({
    name: list.querySelector('[data-testid="list-header-name"]')?.innerText?.trim(),
    cards: Array.from(list.querySelectorAll('a[href*="/c/"]'))
      .map(a => ({
        href: a.getAttribute('href'),
        title: (a.querySelector('[data-testid="card-name"]')
                ?? a).innerText.trim()
      }))
      .filter(c => c.title)
  })))()

Wrap in js(...) + json.loads() and you have structured board data in one round trip.

What NOT to capture here

Private API endpoints (Trello exposes https://trello.com/1/... REST endpoints, but those need a token). Keep this file DOM-only. If you discover public API shapes worth documenting, put them in a separate api.md under this skill folder.

boards-and-lists.md · updated Apr 28, 2026 · 468 words