Firecrawl CLI
Web scraping, search, and browser automation CLI. Returns clean markdown optimized for LLM context windows.
Run firecrawl --help or firecrawl <command> --help for full option details.
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 scrape/crawl consumes credits.
If not ready, see rules/install.md. For output handling guidelines, see rules/security.md.
firecrawl search "query" --scrape --limit 3Workflow
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 --searchto find the right URL, then scrape it. - Crawl - Need bulk content from an entire site section (e.g., all /docs/).
- Browser - Scrape failed because content is behind interaction (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 | browser | 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, use the individual skill for each command (e.g., firecrawl-search, firecrawl-browser) or run firecrawl <command> --help.
Scrape vs browser:
- Use
scrapefirst. It handles static pages and JS-rendered SPAs. - Use
browserwhen 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 browser for web searches - use
searchinstead.
Avoid redundant fetches:
search --scrapealready fetches full page content. Don't re-scrape those URLs.- Check
.firecrawl/for existing data before fetching again.
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.
firecrawl search "react hooks" -o .firecrawl/search-react-hooks.json --json
firecrawl scrape "<url>" -o .firecrawl/page.mdNaming conventions:
.firecrawl/search-{query}.json
.firecrawl/search-{query}-scraped.json
.firecrawl/{site}-{path}.mdNever 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.mdSingle 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.jsonParallelization
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 &
waitFor browser, launch separate sessions for independent tasks and operate them in parallel via --session <id>.
Credit Usage
firecrawl credit-usage
firecrawl credit-usage --json --pretty -o .firecrawl/credits.json