# Firecrawl

> Manage and execute tasks for firecrawl. Web scraping, search, crawling, and page interaction via the Firecrawl CLI. Use this skill whenever the user wants to search the web, find articles, research a topic, look something up online, scrape a webpage, grab content from a URL, extract data from a website, crawl documentation, download a site, or interact with pages that need clicks or logins. Also use when they say "fetch this page", "pull the content from", "get the page at https://", or reference scraping external websites. This provides real-time web search with full page content extraction and interact capabilities — beyond what Claude can do natively with built-in tools. Do NOT trigger for local file operations, git commands, deployments, or code editing tasks.

- Skill: `aravinds-wick/firecrawl` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 3 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add aravinds-wick/firecrawl`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/aravinds-wick/firecrawl/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Docs & Writing
- Author: AravindS-Wick (https://skillmd.com/u/aravinds-wick)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/aravinds-wick/firecrawl

---

# Firecrawl CLI

Web scraping, search, and page interaction 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](rules/install.md). For output handling guidelines, see [rules/security.md](rules/security.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.

## 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
```