firecrawl parse

MCP note

This is a local-filesystem operation — it reads a file (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, etc.) on your machine — so it runs through the firecrawl CLI rather than the bundled (hosted) Firecrawl MCP, which cannot access local files. Install the CLI if you haven't: npm install -g firecrawl-cli (see the firecrawl-cli skill). To parse a document at a URL instead, use the MCP-backed firecrawl-scrape skill.

Turn a local document into clean markdown on disk. Supports PDF, DOCX, DOC, ODT, RTF, XLSX, XLS, HTML/HTM/XHTML.

When to use

• You have a file on disk (not a URL) and want its text as markdown
• User drops a PDF/DOCX and asks what it says, or to summarize it
• Use scrape instead when the source is a URL

Quick start

Always save to .firecrawl/ with -o — parsed docs can be hundreds of KB and blow up context if streamed to stdout. Add .firecrawl/ to .gitignore.