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CLI tool for Firecrawl - scrape, crawl, and extract LLM-ready data from websites

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🔥 Firecrawl CLI

Command-line interface for Firecrawl. Scrape, crawl, and extract data from any website directly from your terminal.

Installation

npm install -g firecrawl-cli

If you are using in any AI agent like Claude Code, you can install the skill with:

npx skills add firecrawl/cli

Quick Start

Just run a command - the CLI will prompt you to authenticate if needed:

firecrawl https://example.com

Authentication

On first run, you'll be prompted to authenticate:

  🔥 firecrawl cli
  Turn websites into LLM-ready data

Welcome! To get started, authenticate with your Firecrawl account.

  1. Login with browser (recommended)
  2. Enter API key manually

Tip: You can also set FIRECRAWL_API_KEY environment variable

Enter choice [1/2]:

Authentication Methods

# Interactive (prompts automatically when needed)
firecrawl

# Browser login
firecrawl login

# Direct API key
firecrawl login --api-key fc-your-api-key

# Environment variable
export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=fc-your-api-key

# Per-command API key
firecrawl scrape https://example.com --api-key fc-your-api-key

Commands

scrape - Scrape a single URL

Extract content from any webpage in various formats.

# Basic usage (outputs markdown)
firecrawl https://example.com
firecrawl scrape https://example.com

# Get raw HTML
firecrawl https://example.com --html
firecrawl https://example.com -H

# Multiple formats (outputs JSON)
firecrawl https://example.com --format markdown,links,images

# Save to file
firecrawl https://example.com -o output.md
firecrawl https://example.com --format json -o data.json --pretty

Scrape Options

Option Description
-f, --format <formats> Output format(s), comma-separated
-H, --html Shortcut for --format html
--only-main-content Extract only main content (removes navs, footers, etc.)
--wait-for <ms> Wait time before scraping (for JS-rendered content)
--screenshot Take a screenshot
--include-tags <tags> Only include specific HTML tags
--exclude-tags <tags> Exclude specific HTML tags
-o, --output <path> Save output to file
--pretty Pretty print JSON output
--timing Show request timing info

Available Formats

Format Description
markdown Clean markdown (default)
html Cleaned HTML
rawHtml Original HTML
links All links on the page
screenshot Screenshot as base64
json Structured JSON extraction

Examples

# Extract only main content as markdown
firecrawl https://blog.example.com --only-main-content

# Wait for JS to render, then scrape
firecrawl https://spa-app.com --wait-for 3000

# Get all links from a page
firecrawl https://example.com --format links

# Screenshot + markdown
firecrawl https://example.com --format markdown --screenshot

# Extract specific elements only
firecrawl https://example.com --include-tags article,main

# Exclude navigation and ads
firecrawl https://example.com --exclude-tags nav,aside,.ad

crawl - Crawl an entire website

Crawl multiple pages from a website.

# Start a crawl (returns job ID)
firecrawl crawl https://example.com

# Wait for crawl to complete
firecrawl crawl https://example.com --wait

# With progress indicator
firecrawl crawl https://example.com --wait --progress

# Check crawl status
firecrawl crawl <job-id>

# Limit pages
firecrawl crawl https://example.com --limit 100 --max-depth 3

Crawl Options

Option Description
--wait Wait for crawl to complete
--progress Show progress while waiting
--limit <n> Maximum pages to crawl
--max-depth <n> Maximum crawl depth
--include-paths <paths> Only crawl matching paths
--exclude-paths <paths> Skip matching paths
--sitemap <mode> include, skip, or only
--allow-subdomains Include subdomains
--allow-external-links Follow external links
--crawl-entire-domain Crawl entire domain
--ignore-query-parameters Treat URLs with different params as same
--delay <ms> Delay between requests
--max-concurrency <n> Max concurrent requests
--timeout <seconds> Timeout when waiting
--poll-interval <seconds> Status check interval

Examples

# Crawl blog section only
firecrawl crawl https://example.com --include-paths /blog,/posts

# Exclude admin pages
firecrawl crawl https://example.com --exclude-paths /admin,/login

# Crawl with rate limiting
firecrawl crawl https://example.com --delay 1000 --max-concurrency 2

# Deep crawl with high limit
firecrawl crawl https://example.com --limit 1000 --max-depth 10 --wait --progress

# Save results
firecrawl crawl https://example.com --wait -o crawl-results.json --pretty

map - Discover all URLs on a website

Quickly discover all URLs on a website without scraping content.

# List all URLs (one per line)
firecrawl map https://example.com

# Output as JSON
firecrawl map https://example.com --json

# Search for specific URLs
firecrawl map https://example.com --search "blog"

# Limit results
firecrawl map https://example.com --limit 500

Map Options

Option Description
--limit <n> Maximum URLs to discover
--search <query> Filter URLs by search query
--sitemap <mode> include, skip, or only
--include-subdomains Include subdomains
--ignore-query-parameters Dedupe URLs with different params
--timeout <seconds> Request timeout
--json Output as JSON
-o, --output <path> Save to file

Examples

# Find all product pages
firecrawl map https://shop.example.com --search "product"

# Get sitemap URLs only
firecrawl map https://example.com --sitemap only

# Save URL list to file
firecrawl map https://example.com -o urls.txt

# Include subdomains
firecrawl map https://example.com --include-subdomains --limit 1000

search - Search the web

Search the web and optionally scrape content from search results.

# Basic search
firecrawl search "firecrawl web scraping"

# Limit results
firecrawl search "AI news" --limit 10

# Search news sources
firecrawl search "tech startups" --sources news

# Search images
firecrawl search "landscape photography" --sources images

# Multiple sources
firecrawl search "machine learning" --sources web,news,images

# Filter by category (GitHub, research papers, PDFs)
firecrawl search "web scraping python" --categories github
firecrawl search "transformer architecture" --categories research
firecrawl search "machine learning" --categories github,research

# Time-based search
firecrawl search "AI announcements" --tbs qdr:d   # Past day
firecrawl search "tech news" --tbs qdr:w          # Past week

# Location-based search
firecrawl search "restaurants" --location "San Francisco,California,United States"
firecrawl search "local news" --country DE

# Search and scrape results
firecrawl search "firecrawl tutorials" --scrape
firecrawl search "API documentation" --scrape --scrape-formats markdown,links

# Output as pretty JSON
firecrawl search "web scraping"

Search Options

Option Description
--limit <n> Maximum results (default: 5, max: 100)
--sources <sources> Comma-separated: web, images, news (default: web)
--categories <categories> Comma-separated: github, research, pdf
--tbs <value> Time filter: qdr:h (hour), qdr:d (day), qdr:w (week), qdr:m (month), qdr:y (year)
--location <location> Geo-targeting (e.g., "Germany", "San Francisco,California,United States")
--country <code> ISO country code (default: US)
--timeout <ms> Timeout in milliseconds (default: 60000)
--ignore-invalid-urls Exclude URLs invalid for other Firecrawl endpoints
--scrape Enable scraping of search results
--scrape-formats <formats> Scrape formats when --scrape enabled (default: markdown)
--only-main-content Include only main content when scraping (default: true)
-o, --output <path> Save to file
--json Output as compact JSON (use -p for pretty JSON)

Examples

# Research a topic with recent results
firecrawl search "React Server Components" --tbs qdr:m --limit 10

# Find GitHub repositories
firecrawl search "web scraping library" --categories github --limit 20

# Search and get full content
firecrawl search "firecrawl documentation" --scrape --scrape-formats markdown -p -o results.json

# Find research papers
firecrawl search "large language models" --categories research -p

# Search with location targeting
firecrawl search "best coffee shops" --location "Berlin,Germany" --country DE

# Get news from the past week
firecrawl search "AI startups funding" --sources news --tbs qdr:w --limit 15

credit-usage - Check your credits

# Show credit usage
firecrawl credit-usage

# Output as JSON
firecrawl credit-usage --json --pretty

config - View configuration

firecrawl config

Shows authentication status and stored credentials location.

login / logout

# Login
firecrawl login
firecrawl login --method browser
firecrawl login --method manual
firecrawl login --api-key fc-xxx

# Logout
firecrawl logout

Global Options

These options work with any command:

Option Description
--status Show version, auth, concurrency, and credits
-k, --api-key <key> Use specific API key
-V, --version Show version
-h, --help Show help

Check Status

firecrawl --status
  🔥 firecrawl cli v1.0.2

  ● Authenticated via stored credentials
  Concurrency: 0/100 jobs (parallel scrape limit)
  Credits: 500,000 / 1,000,000 (50% left this cycle)

Output Handling

Stdout vs File

# Output to stdout (default)
firecrawl https://example.com

# Pipe to another command
firecrawl https://example.com | head -50

# Save to file
firecrawl https://example.com -o output.md

# JSON output
firecrawl https://example.com --format links --pretty

Format Behavior

  • Single format: Outputs raw content (markdown text, HTML, etc.)
  • Multiple formats: Outputs JSON with all requested data
# Raw markdown output
firecrawl https://example.com --format markdown

# JSON output with multiple formats
firecrawl https://example.com --format markdown,links,images

Tips & Tricks

Scrape multiple URLs

# Using a loop
for url in https://example.com/page1 https://example.com/page2; do
  firecrawl "$url" -o "$(echo $url | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/_/g').md"
done

# From a file
cat urls.txt | xargs -I {} firecrawl {} -o {}.md

Combine with other tools

# Extract links and process with jq
firecrawl https://example.com --format links | jq '.links[].url'

# Convert to PDF (with pandoc)
firecrawl https://example.com | pandoc -o document.pdf

# Search within scraped content
firecrawl https://example.com | grep -i "keyword"

CI/CD Usage

# Set API key via environment
export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=${{ secrets.FIRECRAWL_API_KEY }}
firecrawl crawl https://docs.example.com --wait -o docs.json

Telemetry

The CLI collects anonymous usage data during authentication to help improve the product:

  • CLI version, OS, and Node.js version
  • Detect development tools (e.g., Cursor, VS Code, Claude Code)

No command data, URLs, or file contents are collected via the CLI.

To disable telemetry, set the environment variable:

export FIRECRAWL_NO_TELEMETRY=1

Documentation

For more details, visit the Firecrawl Documentation.

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CLI tool for Firecrawl - scrape, crawl, and extract LLM-ready data from websites

docs.firecrawl.dev/cli

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