skills/firecrawl/SKILL.md

5.3 KiB

name description allowed-tools
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.
Bash(firecrawl *)
Bash(npx 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. For output handling guidelines, see rules/security.md.

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.

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