firecrawl

name

firecrawl

description

Use when working with firecrawl/firecrawl or the installed Firecrawl CLI: installing, updating, logging in, checking status, searching the web through Firecrawl, scraping pages, interacting with pages, crawling sites, mapping URLs, parsing files, running Firecrawl agent jobs, using Firecrawl SDK/API examples, or configuring optional firecrawl-mcp for an MCP client. Prefer this for Firecrawl hosted API and CLI workflows. Do not use for generic web search when the host AI has native search, or for local Crawl4AI workflows.

Firecrawl Universal Adapter

Source

• Upstream repository: https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl
• Local source checkout: %USERPROFILE%\.firecrawl-source\firecrawl
• Primary CLI package: firecrawl-cli
• Primary CLI command: firecrawl
• Optional MCP package: firecrawl-mcp
• Router delegator: skill-router firecrawl
• Universal stack source registry: %USERPROFILE%\.universal-ai-stack\config\source-integrations.json

Operating Model

Use Firecrawl as a shared hosted web-data CLI/API integration, not as copied skill bodies or a per-agent install. The universal install uses:

• one shallow upstream source checkout for README-grounded reference,
• one global npm CLI install of firecrawl-cli,
• this canonical skill for routing and workflow instructions,
• compact skill-router wrappers in each AI client,
• optional firecrawl-mcp only for clients that specifically need an MCP server.

No persistent MCP bridge is required for normal Firecrawl work. Use direct CLI or SDK/API calls first.

Safety And State Boundaries

Never commit or paste:

• FIRECRAWL_API_KEY,
• Firecrawl account, credit, billing, or workspace details,
• local auth/session files created by firecrawl login,
• project-local .firecrawl/ caches and generated outputs,
• generated scrape/crawl output from private or authenticated pages,
• browser profile data, cookies, screenshots, or downloaded private content.

Use the user's Firecrawl account only after they authenticate with firecrawl login, firecrawl login --browser, or a local FIRECRAWL_API_KEY. Respect robots.txt, site terms, auth boundaries, and rate limits. Ask before using authenticated pages, proxies, high-volume crawls, or batch scraping.

Prefer host-native web search for quick current lookups when available. Use Firecrawl when the task needs Firecrawl-specific search with scraped result content, hosted scraping, structured extraction, interact actions, URL mapping, site crawling, file parsing, or Firecrawl MCP/SDK integration.

Install And Health

Check local state:

skill-router firecrawl status

Install or update the CLI:

skill-router firecrawl install

Update the source checkout and reinstall the CLI:

skill-router firecrawl update

Authenticate when needed:

firecrawl login --browser

Check account/API readiness without exposing secrets:

firecrawl --status

Show optional MCP setup notes:

skill-router firecrawl mcp-help

CLI Workflows

Search with result content:

firecrawl search "model context protocol docs" --limit 5 --pretty

Scrape a page to clean Markdown:

firecrawl scrape https://example.com --only-main-content

Scrape with structured JSON:

firecrawl scrape https://example.com --format json --schema-file .\schema.json --pretty

Map a site:

firecrawl map https://example.com --json --pretty

Crawl a bounded site section:

firecrawl crawl https://example.com/docs --limit 25 --max-depth 2 --wait --pretty

Interact after a scrape:

firecrawl scrape https://example.com
firecrawl interact "Click the pricing link and summarize the plans"

Run an agent job:

firecrawl agent "Find the pricing plans for Notion" --pretty

Parse a local file through Firecrawl:

firecrawl parse .\document.pdf --format markdown

MCP Policy

Register firecrawl-mcp only when the target AI client needs live MCP tools. The portable config shape is:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "firecrawl-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "firecrawl-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "from the user's local secret store"
      }
    }
  }
}

Do not add this MCP server globally by default. Router-first clients should use skill-router firecrawl ... and direct CLI calls.

When To Use This Skill

Use this skill for:

• Firecrawl CLI install, update, status, login, or diagnosis,
• Firecrawl hosted search, scrape, crawl, map, parse, interact, or agent jobs,
• Firecrawl Python/Node/cURL/API examples,
• Firecrawl MCP server configuration,
• Firecrawl source checkout or upstream README interpretation.

Reject this skill for:

• local Crawl4AI workflows; use crawl4ai,
• generic web search/current-news tasks that can use the host search tool,
• ordinary browser automation better handled by Browser, Playwright, or Lightpanda,
• unrelated "fire" or "crawl" wording that is not Firecrawl.