/firecrawl

Name

firecrawl

Description

|

Any live-web task via the Firecrawl CLI — including ordinary web research

searching the web, reading or extracting pages, gathering sources, discovering site URLs, bulk extraction, downloading a site, change alerts, or pages needing clicks/login — web only; local files route to firecrawl-parse. For US legal or regulatory questions use gov; for papers use firecrawl-research-index; for library, API, error, or bug questions use firecrawl-developer-index.

# 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. For app integration or outcome workflows (research briefs, SEO audits, etc.), route to the `firecrawl-build` / `firecrawl-workflows` skills — see [When to Load References](#when-to-load-references).

## Prerequisites

Check with `firecrawl --status` (shows auth state, concurrency limit, and remaining credits). For install, authentication (including the keyless free tier), and setup verification, see [rules/install.md](rules/install.md). For output handling guidelines, see [rules/security.md](rules/security.md).

## Workflow

Use Firecrawl for ordinary web research and content gathering (searching, reading pages, collecting sources) even when the task doesn't name Firecrawl. Exception: tasks needing capabilities Firecrawl lacks.

For structured datasets, first check for a suitable workflow or data provider using the [search skill](../firecrawl-search/SKILL.md). Read a known page directly; reuse a selected contract instead of repeating discovery.

Follow this escalation pattern:

1. **Search** - Start with the actual question. Find web sources and relevant structured-data tools through semantic and domain matching.
2. **Inspect + Scrape** - For a tool match, use `list <provider> <capability> --pretty` if its contract is missing, then execute with `scrape <provider/capability> --options '<JSON>'`. For a URL, scrape 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. **Monitor** - Need recurring checks or ongoing alerts. Prefer setting a monitor with `--page` plus `--goal` instead of doing repeated one-off scrapes.
6. **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                                             |
| Find research papers        | `research`            | Biomedical/clinical/scientific literature — use the paper index |
| Answer a coding question    | `developer`           | Issues, merged PRs, READMEs, and docs — not a general web page  |
| Find US law or regulation   | `gov`                 | US statutes, regulations, codes, and court opinions             |
| 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    | `x download`          | Save an entire site as local files                              |
| Parse a local file          | `parse`               | File on disk (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, etc.) — not a URL                |
| Watch pages for changes     | `monitor`             | Schedule recurring scrapes/crawls, diff against snapshots       |

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

For US legal or regulatory source discovery, start with `firecrawl gov "<question, jurisdiction, and date>" --limit 10`. If the user supplies a source URL, read it directly with `scrape`. Results are excerpts, not a guarantee of official-only sources or current governing law: verify the issuer, jurisdiction, enacted/effective status, and version before citing a controlling section and supporting passage. Ask for a missing jurisdiction before identifying the governing rule. Use general search for non-US questions or missing coverage; no hits does not establish that no applicable law exists.

**Done when:** the narrowest suitable command has completed the request, its output was inspected, and the answer cites the saved source files.

**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.
- For web searches, use `search` — interact is for acting on a specific page.

**Monitor:** Bias toward `monitor` when the user's goal is ongoing change detection, alerting, or repeated checks over time — not another one-off scrape. Goal writing, schedules, target modes, and JSON-mode change tracking are documented in [firecrawl-monitor](../firecrawl-monitor/SKILL.md).

**Reuse fetched content:**

- `search --scrape` already fetches full page content. Reuse it instead of re-scraping those URLs.
- Check `.firecrawl/` for existing data before fetching again.

## Large results and Alexandria

`search` discovers web results and tools, `list` reveals a selected tool's contract, and `scrape <provider/capability> --options '<JSON>'` executes it. Inspect only the contracts needed for the task.

A client context/output error does not prove the provider failed. Keep the request/scrape ID and inspect saved output or use `scrape firecrawl/bash` against the retained result before repeating the request. See [large-result recovery](../firecrawl-scrape/references/large-results.md). Do not assume the client can signal an overflow back to the tool, or that Bash supports search IDs or every provider's retained data.

## When to Load References

- **Searching the web or finding sources first** -> [firecrawl-search](../firecrawl-search/SKILL.md)
- **Finding research papers (biomedical, clinical, or scientific literature; PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv)** -> [firecrawl-research-index](../firecrawl-research-index/SKILL.md). Use the paper index instead of scraping PubMed or Google Scholar by hand; `search --categories research` is a website filter, not the paper index.
- **Answering a library, API, error, or known-bug question from issues, merged PRs, READMEs, or docs** -> [firecrawl-developer-index](../firecrawl-developer-index/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)
- **Parsing a local file (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, HTML, etc.)** -> [firecrawl-parse](../firecrawl-parse/SKILL.md)
- **Detecting content changes on a website and getting notified by webhook or email (pricing, jobs, posts, docs, status pages, anything ongoing)** -> [firecrawl-monitor](../firecrawl-monitor/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** -> the [firecrawl-build skills](https://github.com/firecrawl/skills/tree/main/skills/build) (`firecrawl-build-onboarding`, `-scrape`, `-search`, `-interact`). They live in a separate repo; install with `firecrawl setup build`.
- **Producing Firecrawl-powered deliverables such as research briefs, SEO audits, QA reports, lead lists, knowledge bases, or design-system extraction** -> use the `firecrawl-workflows` skills (already installed alongside this CLI skill). These skills infer from context first and ask only short blocking questions when needed.

## 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
```

Read output files incrementally with `grep`, `head`, or bounded 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. Use `jq` to work with JSON output, e.g. `jq -r '.data.web[].url' .firecrawl/search.json`.

## Feedback

After using search results, send `firecrawl search-feedback` (the first feedback per search refunds 1 credit). The full pattern, guard, and rules live in [firecrawl-search](../firecrawl-search/SKILL.md).

For Alexandria feedback about a provider result or coverage gap (each refunds 1 credit, up to 10 per website and 100 per team each UTC day), see [firecrawl-alexandria](../firecrawl-alexandria/SKILL.md).

For non-search endpoint jobs, use `firecrawl feedback <endpoint> <jobId>` to send concise job-level feedback through `/v2/feedback`. Supported endpoints are `search`, `scrape`, `parse`, and `map`.

```bash
firecrawl feedback scrape "$SCRAPE_ID" \
  --rating partial \
  --issues missing_markdown \
  --tags docs \
  --note "The pricing table was missing from the markdown output." \
  --url "https://example.com/pricing" \
  --page-numbers 1 \
  --silent &
```

Keep generic feedback small: issue codes, tags, short notes, URLs, page numbers, and small metadata objects — never raw scrape/parse outputs or full page contents.

**Opt out:** `export FIRECRAWL_NO_ENDPOINT_FEEDBACK=1` makes the CLI skip every endpoint feedback call silently. Respect that flag — do not try to work around it.

## 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
```