Cli firecrawl

Name: firecrawl
Author: firecrawl

install

source · Clone the upstream repo

git clone https://github.com/firecrawl/cli

Claude Code · Install into ~/.claude/skills/

T=$(mktemp -d) && git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/firecrawl/cli "$T" && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r "$T/skills/firecrawl-cli" ~/.claude/skills/firecrawl-cli-firecrawl && rm -rf "$T"

manifest: skills/firecrawl-cli/SKILL.md

source content

Firecrawl CLI

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

Run

firecrawl --help

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. For output handling guidelines, see rules/security.md.

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

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

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

Workflow

Follow this escalation pattern:

Search - No specific URL yet. Find pages, answer questions, discover sources.
Scrape - Have a URL. Extract its content directly.
Map + Scrape - Large site or need a specific subpage. Use
```
map --search
```
to find the right URL, then scrape it.
Crawl - Need bulk content from an entire site section (e.g., all /docs/).
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
Scraping a known URL -> firecrawl-scrape
Finding URLs on a known site -> firecrawl-map
Bulk extraction from a docs section or site -> firecrawl-crawl
AI-powered structured extraction from complex sites -> firecrawl-agent
Clicks, forms, login, pagination, or post-scrape browser actions -> firecrawl-interact
Downloading a site to local files -> firecrawl-download
Install, auth, or setup problems -> rules/install.md
Output handling and safe file-reading patterns -> 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/

.gitignore

. Always quote URLs - shell interprets

and

as special characters.

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:

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:

# 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:

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

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