Web Scraper - Firecrawl

Web scraping and content extraction using Firecrawl API. Use when users need to crawl websites, extract structured data, convert web pages to markdown, scrape multiple URLs, or build knowledge bases from web content. Supports single page extraction, site-wide crawling, batch processing, and structured data extraction with CSS selectors.

Firecrawl Skill

Powerful web scraping powered by Firecrawl - turn websites into LLM-ready markdown.

Overview

Firecrawl provides APIs for:

• Scrape - Single page extraction to markdown
• Crawl - Entire site crawling with depth control
• Map - URL discovery from a starting point
• Batch - Multiple URL processing
• Extract - Structured data extraction with schemas

Prerequisites

1. Firecrawl API Key - Get free tier at https://firecrawl.dev
2. Install Python dependencies: requests

Configuration

Set environment variable:

bash

export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY="fc-your-api-key"

Usage

Single Page Scraping

bash

# Basic scrape
firecrawl scrape https://example.com

# With specific options
firecrawl scrape https://example.com --formats markdown,html --only-main-content

# Wait for JS rendering
firecrawl scrape https://spa-app.com --wait-for 2000

Site Crawling

bash

# Crawl entire site (up to limit)
firecrawl crawl https://docs.example.com --limit 50

# With depth control
firecrawl crawl https://blog.example.com --max-depth 2 --limit 100

# Include/exclude patterns
firecrawl crawl https://site.com --include "/blog/*" --exclude "/admin/*"

# Custom formats
firecrawl crawl https://docs.example.com --formats markdown,links

URL Mapping

bash

# Discover all URLs from a site
firecrawl map https://example.com

# With search term
firecrawl map https://docs.python.org --search "tutorial"

Batch Processing

bash

# Scrape multiple URLs
firecrawl batch urls.txt --output ./scraped/

# From JSON list
firecrawl batch urls.json --formats markdown --concurrency 5

Structured Extraction

bash

# Extract specific data using CSS selectors
firecrawl extract https://example.com/products \
  --schema '{"name": ".product-title", "price": ".price", "description": ".desc"}'

# Extract to JSON
firecrawl extract https://news.example.com/article --schema article-schema.json

Output Formats

Markdown

Clean, LLM-ready markdown with:

• Headings preserved
• Links converted to markdown format
• Images with alt text
• Tables formatted as markdown tables

HTML

Raw or cleaned HTML

Links

Extracted link lists for further crawling

Screenshot

Page screenshot (if requested)

Use Cases

Knowledge Base Building

bash

# Crawl documentation site
firecrawl crawl https://docs.framework.com --limit 200 -o ./kb/

# Merge into single file for RAG
cat ./kb/*.md > knowledge-base.md

Research & Analysis

bash

# Scrape competitor pricing
firecrawl batch competitors.txt --extract pricing-schema.json

# Monitor blog updates
firecrawl map https://blog.company.com --since 2024-01-01

Content Migration

bash

# Export old CMS content
firecrawl crawl https://old-site.com --formats markdown,html -o ./export/

Scripts

All functionality via scripts/firecrawl.py:

• Handles API authentication
• Automatic rate limiting
• Retry logic for failures
• Progress tracking for large crawls

Integration

Works well with:

• markdown-sync-pro - Sync scraped content to Notion/GitHub
• arxiv-paper - Combine with academic paper downloads
• maybe-finance - Scrape financial data for analysis