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.

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/ 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.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