firecrawl-crawl git:20260820.5b171dcA

Immutable. This exact content never changes and is served at /api/v1/blob/2f408236aea7f85e.

---
name: firecrawl-crawl
description: |
  Bulk-extract many pages from one site or section. Use for "crawl", "everything under /docs", or content spanning linked pages.
allowed-tools:
  - Bash(firecrawl *)
  - Bash(npx firecrawl-cli *)
---

# firecrawl crawl

Bulk extract content from a website. Crawls pages following links up to a depth/limit.

**Prerequisite:** `crawl` requires authentication (no keyless free tier); without credentials the CLI prompts an interactive login.

## When to use

- You need content from many pages on a site (e.g., all `/docs/`)
- You want to extract an entire site section
- Step 4 in the [workflow escalation pattern](../firecrawl/SKILL.md): search → scrape → map + scrape → **crawl** → monitor → interact

## Quick start

```bash
# Crawl a docs section
firecrawl crawl "<url>" --include-paths /docs --limit 50 --wait -o .firecrawl/crawl.json

# Full crawl with depth limit
firecrawl crawl "<url>" --max-depth 3 --wait --progress -o .firecrawl/crawl.json

# Check status of a running crawl
firecrawl crawl <job-id>
```

## Options

| Option                    | Description                                 |
| ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------- |
| `--wait`                  | Wait for crawl to complete before returning |
| `--progress`              | Show progress while waiting                 |
| `--limit <n>`             | Max pages to crawl                          |
| `--max-depth <n>`         | Max link depth to follow                    |
| `--include-paths <paths>` | Only crawl URLs matching these paths        |
| `--exclude-paths <paths>` | Skip URLs matching these paths              |
| `--delay <ms>`            | Delay between requests                      |
| `--max-concurrency <n>`   | Max parallel crawl workers                  |
| `--pretty`                | Pretty print JSON output                    |
| `-o, --output <path>`     | Output file path                            |

## Tips

- Always use `--wait` when you need the results immediately. It has no default timeout; use `--timeout <seconds>` to bound polling. Without `--wait`, crawl returns a job ID for async polling.
- Use `--include-paths` to scope the crawl — don't crawl an entire site when you only need one section.
- Crawl consumes credits per page. Check `firecrawl credit-usage` before large crawls (`credit-usage` requires authentication).

## See also

- [firecrawl-scrape](../firecrawl-scrape/SKILL.md) — scrape individual pages
- [firecrawl-map](../firecrawl-map/SKILL.md) — discover URLs before deciding to crawl
- [firecrawl-download](../firecrawl-download/SKILL.md) — download site to local files (uses map + scrape)