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.

If not ready, see rules/install.md. For output handling guidelines, see rules/security.md.

When to Use What

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

Scrape vs browser:

• Use scrape first. It handles static pages and JS-rendered SPAs (with --wait-for).
• Use browser only when scrape fails because content is behind interaction: pagination buttons, modals, dropdowns, multi-step navigation, or infinite scroll.
• Never use browser for web searches - use search instead.
• Never use browser on bot-protected sites (Google, Bing, Cloudflare challenges).

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.

firecrawl search "react hooks" -o .firecrawl/search-react-hooks.json --json
firecrawl scrape "<url>" -o .firecrawl/page.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.

Commands

search

Web search with optional content scraping. Run firecrawl search --help for all options.

# Basic search
firecrawl search "your query" -o .firecrawl/result.json --json

# Search and scrape full page content from results
firecrawl search "your query" --scrape -o .firecrawl/scraped.json --json

# News from the past day
firecrawl search "your query" --sources news --tbs qdr:d -o .firecrawl/news.json --json

Options: --limit <n>, --sources <web,images,news>, --categories <github,research,pdf>, --tbs <qdr:h|d|w|m|y>, --location, --country <code>, --scrape, --scrape-formats, -o

scrape

Single page content extraction. Run firecrawl scrape --help for all options.

# Basic markdown extraction
firecrawl scrape "<url>" -o .firecrawl/page.md

# Main content only, no nav/footer
firecrawl scrape "<url>" --only-main-content -o .firecrawl/page.md

# Wait for JS to render, then scrape
firecrawl scrape "<url>" --wait-for 3000 -o .firecrawl/page.md

# Get markdown and links together
firecrawl scrape "<url>" --format markdown,links -o .firecrawl/page.json

Options: -f <markdown,html,rawHtml,links,screenshot,json>, -H, --only-main-content, --wait-for <ms>, --include-tags, --exclude-tags, -o

map

Discover URLs on a site. Run firecrawl map --help for all options.

# Find a specific page on a large site
firecrawl map "<url>" --search "authentication" -o .firecrawl/filtered.txt

# Get all URLs
firecrawl map "<url>" --limit 500 --json -o .firecrawl/urls.json

Options: --limit <n>, --search <query>, --sitemap <include|skip|only>, --include-subdomains, --json, -o

crawl

Bulk extract from a website. Run firecrawl crawl --help for all options.

# Crawl a docs section
firecrawl crawl "<url>" --include-paths /docs --limit 50 --wait -o .firecrawl/crawl.json

# Full crawl with depth limit
firecrawl crawl "<url>" --max-depth 3 --wait --progress -o .firecrawl/crawl.json

# Check status of a running crawl
firecrawl crawl <job-id>

Options: --wait, --progress, --limit <n>, --max-depth <n>, --include-paths, --exclude-paths, --delay <ms>, --max-concurrency <n>, --pretty, -o

agent

AI-powered autonomous extraction (2-5 minutes). Run firecrawl agent --help for all options.

# Extract structured data
firecrawl agent "extract all pricing tiers" --wait -o .firecrawl/pricing.json

# With a JSON schema for structured output
firecrawl agent "extract products" --schema '{"type":"object","properties":{"name":{"type":"string"},"price":{"type":"number"}}}' --wait -o .firecrawl/products.json

# Focus on specific pages
firecrawl agent "get feature list" --urls "<url>" --wait -o .firecrawl/features.json

Options: --urls, --model <spark-1-mini|spark-1-pro>, --schema <json>, --schema-file, --max-credits <n>, --wait, --pretty, -o

browser

Cloud Chromium sessions in Firecrawl's remote sandboxed environment. Run firecrawl browser --help and firecrawl browser "agent-browser --help" to get all available commands.

# Typical browser workflow
firecrawl browser "open <url>"
firecrawl browser "snapshot"                          # see the page structure with @ref IDs
firecrawl browser "click @e5"                         # interact with elements
firecrawl browser "fill @e3 'search query'"           # fill form fields
firecrawl browser close

Commands: open, snapshot, screenshot, click, type, fill, scrape, scroll, wait, eval

Session management: launch-session --ttl 600, list, close

Options: --ttl <seconds>, --ttl-inactivity <seconds>, --stream, --session <id>, -o

credit-usage

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

Working with Results

# 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