firecrawl

# Firecrawl CLI

Search, scrape, and interact with the web. Returns clean markdown optimized for LLM context windows.

Run `firecrawl --help` or `firecrawl <command> --help` for full option details.

If the task is to integrate Firecrawl into an application, add `FIRECRAWL_API_KEY` to a project, or choose endpoint usage in product code, use the `firecrawl-build` skills. They are already installed alongside this CLI skill when you run `firecrawl init`.

## Prerequisites

Must be installed and authenticated. Check with `firecrawl --status`.

```
  🔥 firecrawl cli v1.8.0

  ● Authenticated via FIRECRAWL_API_KEY
  Concurrency: 0/100 jobs (parallel scrape limit)
  Credits: 500,000 remaining
```

- **Concurrency**: Max parallel jobs. Run parallel operations up to this limit.
- **Credits**: Remaining API credits. Each operation consumes credits.

If not ready, see [rules/install.md](rules/install.md). For output handling guidelines, see [rules/security.md](rules/security.md).

Before doing real work, verify the setup with one small request:

```bash
mkdir -p .firecrawl
firecrawl scrape "https://firecrawl.dev" -o .firecrawl/install-check.md
```

```bash
firecrawl search "query" --scrape --limit 3
```

## Workflow

Follow this escalation pattern:

1. **Search** - No specific URL yet. Find pages, answer questions, discover sources.
2. **Scrape** - Have a URL. Extract its content directly.
3. **Map + Scrape** - Large site or need a specific subpage. Use `map --search` to find the right URL, then scrape it.
4. **Crawl** - Need bulk content from an entire site section (e.g., all /docs/).
5. **Interact** - Scrape first, then interact with the page (pagination, modals, form submissions, multi-step navigation).

| Need                        | Command               | When                                                      |
| --------------------------- | --------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------- |
| Find pages on a topic       | `search`              | No specific URL yet                                       |
| Get a page's content        | `scrape`              | Have a URL, page is static or JS-rendered                 |
| Find URLs within a site     | `map`                 | Need to locate a specific subpage                         |
| Bulk extract a site section | `crawl`               | Need many pages (e.g., all /docs/)                        |
| AI-powered data extraction  | `agent`               | Need structured data from complex sites                   |
| Interact with a page        | `scrape` + `interact` | Content requires clicks, form fills, pagination, or login |
| Download a site to files    | `download`            | Save an entire site as local files                        |

For detailed command reference, run `firecrawl <command> --help`.

**Scrape vs interact:**

- Use `scrape` first. It handles static pages and JS-rendered SPAs.
- Use `scrape` + `interact` when you need to interact with a page, such as clicking buttons, filling out forms, navigating through a complex site, infinite scroll, or when scrape fails to grab all the content you need.
- Never use interact for web searches - use `search` instead.

**Avoid redundant fetches:**

- `search --scrape` already fetches full page content. Don't re-scrape those URLs.
- Check `.firecrawl/` for existing data before fetching again.

## When to Load References

- **Searching the web or finding sources first** -> [firecrawl-search](../firecrawl-search/SKILL.md)
- **Scraping a known URL** -> [firecrawl-scrape](../firecrawl-scrape/SKILL.md)
- **Finding URLs on a known site** -> [firecrawl-map](../firecrawl-map/SKILL.md)
- **Bulk extraction from a docs section or site** -> [firecrawl-crawl](../firecrawl-crawl/SKILL.md)
- **AI-powered structured extraction from complex sites** -> [firecrawl-agent](../firecrawl-agent/SKILL.md)
- **Clicks, forms, login, pagination, or post-scrape browser actions** -> [firecrawl-interact](../firecrawl-interact/SKILL.md)
- **Downloading a site to local files** -> [firecrawl-download](../firecrawl-download/SKILL.md)
- **Install, auth, or setup problems** -> [rules/install.md](rules/install.md)
- **Output handling and safe file-reading patterns** -> [rules/security.md](rules/security.md)
- **Integrating Firecrawl into an app, adding `FIRECRAWL_API_KEY` to `.env`, or choosing endpoint usage in product code** -> use the `firecrawl-build` skills (already installed alongside this CLI skill)

## Output & Organization

Unless the user specifies to return in context, write results to `.firecrawl/` with `-o`. Add `.firecrawl/` to `.gitignore`. Always quote URLs - shell interprets `?` and `&` as special characters.

```bash
firecrawl search "react hooks" -o .firecrawl/search-react-hooks.json --json
firecrawl scrape "<url>" -o .firecrawl/page.md
```

Naming conventions:

```
.firecrawl/search-{query}.json
.firecrawl/search-{query}-scraped.json
.firecrawl/{site}-{path}.md
```

Never read entire output files at once. Use `grep`, `head`, or incremental reads:

```bash
wc -l .firecrawl/file.md && head -50 .firecrawl/file.md
grep -n "keyword" .firecrawl/file.md
```

Single format outputs raw content. Multiple formats (e.g., `--format markdown,links`) output JSON.

## Working with Results

These patterns are useful when working with file-based output (`-o` flag) for complex tasks:

```bash
# Extract URLs from search
jq -r '.data.web[].url' .firecrawl/search.json

# Get titles and URLs
jq -r '.data.web[] | "\(.title): \(.url)"' .firecrawl/search.json
```

## Parallelization

Run independent operations in parallel. Check `firecrawl --status` for concurrency limit:

```bash
firecrawl scrape "<url-1>" -o .firecrawl/1.md &
firecrawl scrape "<url-2>" -o .firecrawl/2.md &
firecrawl scrape "<url-3>" -o .firecrawl/3.md &
wait
```

For interact, scrape multiple pages and interact with each independently using their scrape IDs.

## Credit Usage

```bash
firecrawl credit-usage
firecrawl credit-usage --json --pretty -o .firecrawl/credits.json
```