Firecrawl — Web Scraping & Extraction

Always use the firecrawl CLI first. Fall back to the firecrawl-mcp MCP server only when the CLI genuinely cannot do the job. The CLI runs token-free via Bash and is faster; the MCP costs context on every call.

Step 0 — Verify prerequisites

Before running anything, confirm the CLI is installed and the API key is set:

firecrawl --version          # should print a version number
echo $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY      # should print fc-...

If the CLI is missing:

npm install -g firecrawl-cli