CLI Recipes

Web Search CLI Recipes

CLI commands for Firecrawl and Jina — the two services with official CLIs.

Firecrawl CLI

Installation

npm install -g firecrawl-cli
# or run without install:
npx -y firecrawl-cli@latest

Authentication

firecrawl login --browser    # Browser-based login
firecrawl login --api-key fc-YOUR_KEY  # Direct key
firecrawl view-config        # Show current auth/config
firecrawl logout             # Sign out

Scrape a Page

firecrawl https://example.com/page
firecrawl scrape https://example.com/page --format markdown,links
firecrawl scrape https://example.com/spa --wait-for 3000  # JS rendering
firecrawl scrape https://example.com --screenshot  # Capture screenshot
firecrawl scrape https://example.com -o output.md  # Save to file
firecrawl scrape https://example.com --json --pretty  # JSON output

Search the Web

firecrawl search "Next.js server components tutorial"
firecrawl search "React hooks" --limit 20
firecrawl search "TypeScript patterns" --scrape  # Search + scrape results
firecrawl search "AI news" --tbs qdr:d  # Last 24 hours
firecrawl search "tech startups" --location "San Francisco"

Crawl a Site

firecrawl crawl https://docs.example.com --wait --progress
firecrawl crawl https://docs.example.com --limit 50 --max-depth 3
firecrawl crawl https://docs.example.com --include-paths "/docs/*"
firecrawl crawl https://docs.example.com --exclude-paths "/blog/*"
firecrawl crawl JOB_ID  # Check existing crawl status

Map Site URLs

firecrawl map https://example.com
firecrawl map https://example.com --limit 200
firecrawl map https://example.com --allow-subdomains

Autonomous Agent

firecrawl agent "Find top 5 headless CMS and compare pricing"
firecrawl agent "Research React state management libraries" --wait
firecrawl agent "Find API rate limits" --urls https://docs.stripe.com --schema schema.json

Interact (live browser)

Drive dynamic pages with natural language or code — replaces the old firecrawl browser session flow:

firecrawl interact https://example.com --prompt "log in and open the dashboard"

Monitor Changes

Recurring scrapes with change detection:

firecrawl monitor create https://example.com/pricing
firecrawl monitor list

Developer Index Search

Search GitHub issues, PRs, READMEs, and docs:

firecrawl developer "nextjs hydration mismatch"

Useful Flags

Jina CLI

Installation

pip install jina-cli
# or
uv pip install jina-cli

Authentication

export JINA_API_KEY=jina_xxx

Read a Page

jina read https://example.com/page
jina read https://example.com --json  # Structured output

Search the Web

jina search "React hooks best practices"
jina search "React hooks" -n 10  # Number of results
jina search "AI news" --time d   # Past day (d/w/m)
jina search "tech" --gl us --hl en  # Geo/language targeting

Specialized Search

jina search "transformer models" --arxiv   # Search arXiv
jina search "financial analysis" --ssrn    # Search SSRN
jina search "UI components" --images       # Image search
jina search "Jina releases" --blog         # Jina blog

Text Processing

jina embed "text to embed"
jina rerank "query" < documents.txt
jina classify "product review text" --labels positive,negative,neutral
jina dedup < urls.txt  # Deduplicate

Utilities

jina screenshot https://example.com -o screenshot.png
jina screenshot https://example.com --full-page
jina bibtex "attention is all you need"
jina expand "machine learning optimization"
jina pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00001 --type figure,table
jina datetime https://example.com/article  # Guess publish date

Pipe Composability

Jina CLI follows Unix philosophy — pipe commands together:

# Search and rerank
jina search "transformer models" | jina rerank "efficient inference"

# Read multiple URLs
cat urls.txt | jina read

# Search and deduplicate
jina search "attention mechanism" | jina dedup

# Search, read, and save
jina search "React patterns" -n 5 | jina read > research.md

Local Mode (Apple Silicon)

Run embed, rerank, classify, and dedup locally without API key:

pip install jina-grep
jina grep serve start  # Start local embedding server
jina embed --local "hello world"
jina classify --local "text" --labels positive,negative

Caveat: jina-grep is not currently published on PyPI, so pip install jina-grep fails as of 2026-08 (upstream jina-cli docs give this same instruction; an npm package named jina-grep exists but is an empty placeholder). Check https://github.com/jina-ai/jina-grep-cli for the actual install method before relying on local mode.

Useful Flags

Cross-CLI Workflow Examples

Scrape and process content pipeline

# Use Firecrawl to find URLs, Jina to process
firecrawl map https://docs.example.com --json | \
  jq -r '.urls[]' | \
  head -10 | \
  while read url; do jina read "$url"; done > all_docs.md

Search with both engines and compare

firecrawl search "React server components" --json > firecrawl_results.json
jina search "React server components" --json > jina_results.json