/firecrawl-cli

name: firecrawl
description: |
  Search, scrape, and interact with the web 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, get 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 external websites. This provides real-time web search with full page content 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.
allowed-tools:
  - Bash(firecrawl *)
  - Bash(npx firecrawl *)

Firecrawl CLI

Search, scrape, and interact with the web. Returns clean markdown optimized for LLM context windows.

Run `firecrawl --help` or `firecrawl <command> --help` for full option details.

If the task is to integrate Firecrawl into an application, add `FIRECRAWL_API_KEY` to a project, or choose endpoint usage in product code, use the `firecrawl-build` skills. If the task is an outcome workflow such as deep research, SEO audit, QA, lead generation, knowledge-base creation, dashboard reporting, shopping research, or website design-system extraction, use the `firecrawl-workflows` skills. They are already installed alongside this CLI skill when you run `firecrawl init`.

Prerequisites

Must be installed. 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 operation consumes credits.

Authenticating gives the best results. Prefer a free account via `firecrawl init --browser` (browser login) or a `FIRECRAWL_API_KEY` whenever the human can sign up. If you cannot obtain a key and the human cannot sign up, you can still search, scrape, and interact without an API key on the keyless free tier (rate-limited). See [agent onboarding](https://www.firecrawl.dev/agent-onboarding/SKILL.md) for the full set of onboarding paths.

If not ready, see [rules/install.md](rules/install.md). For output handling guidelines, see [rules/security.md](rules/security.md).

Before doing real work, verify the setup with one small request:

mkdir -p .firecrawl
firecrawl scrape "https://firecrawl.dev" -o .firecrawl/install-check.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. **Monitor** - Need recurring checks or ongoing alerts. Prefer setting a monitor with `--page` plus `--goal` instead of doing repeated one-off scrapes. 6. **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 | | Find research papers | `research` | Biomedical/clinical/scientific literature — never scrape PubMed by hand | | 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 | | Parse a local file | `parse` | File on disk (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, etc.) — not a URL | | Watch pages for changes | `monitor` | Schedule recurring scrapes/crawls, diff against snapshots |

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.

**Monitor:** Schedule recurring scrapes or crawls and diff each result against the last retained snapshot. Bias toward `monitor` when the user's goal is ongoing change detection, alerting, or repeated checks over time. For a single page, default to setting a monitor with `--page <url>` and `--goal "..."`. Use for product pages, docs, blogs, changelogs, competitor sites — any page where changes matter. Each monitor should include a short `goal` describing what changes matter, and each check labels pages as `same`, `new`, `changed`, `removed`, or `error`, with webhook and email notification options.

When writing `--goal`, convert the user's monitoring