Firecrawl CLI

Web scraping, crawling, searching, and browser automation via the Firecrawl CLI (firecrawl). Use when scraping URLs to markdown/HTML, crawling entire websites, discovering all URLs on a site, running web searches with optional scraping, launching cloud browser sessions for automation, or using the AI agent for natural-language web queries. Requires firecrawl-cli installed (npm install -g firecrawl-cli) and authentication (firecrawl login or FIRECRAWL_API_KEY env var). Triggers on: scrape URL, crawl site, map website URLs, firecrawl search, browser automation with firecrawl, web agent query.

Installation & Auth

bash

npm install -g firecrawl-cli
firecrawl login --browser        # Recommended for agents
# or
export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=fc-YOUR-KEY
firecrawl --status               # Verify: shows credits + concurrency

Commands Summary

Command	Purpose
firecrawl scrape <url>	Scrape single URL
firecrawl search "<query>"	Web search (+ optional scrape)
firecrawl map <url>	Discover all URLs on a site
firecrawl crawl <url>	Crawl entire website (async job)
firecrawl browser	Cloud browser sandbox automation
firecrawl agent "<prompt>"	NL-driven web agent queries

Key Patterns

Scrape (most common):

bash

firecrawl https://example.com --only-main-content          # Clean markdown
firecrawl https://example.com --format markdown,links      # Multiple formats → JSON
firecrawl https://example.com -o output.md                 # Save to file

Crawl a docs site:

bash

firecrawl crawl https://docs.example.com --limit 50 --max-depth 2 --wait --progress -o docs.json

Browser automation (AI agents):

bash

firecrawl browser launch-session
firecrawl browser execute "open https://example.com"
firecrawl browser execute "snapshot"     # Returns @ref IDs
firecrawl browser execute "click @e5"
firecrawl browser execute "scrape"
firecrawl browser close

AI agent query:

bash

firecrawl agent "Find top 5 AI startups and funding" --wait
firecrawl agent "Compare pricing" --urls https://a.com,https://b.com --wait

Full Reference

See references/commands.md for all commands, options, and examples.

Tips

• Use --only-main-content for clean article content (removes nav/footer)
• crawl returns a job ID immediately — use --wait to block or poll with job ID later
• Browser execute default mode is agent-browser (bash) — 40+ commands, best for agents
• spark-1-mini (default) is 60% cheaper than spark-1-pro for agent queries
• Check concurrency limit with --status before parallelizing scrape jobs
• Self-hosted instances skip API key auth automatically when --api-url is set