---
title: "FirecrawlCrawler"
id: firecrawlcrawler
slug: "/firecrawlcrawler"
description: "Use Firecrawl to crawl websites and return the content as Haystack Documents. Unlike single-page fetchers, FirecrawlCrawler follows links and discovers subpages."
---

# FirecrawlCrawler

Use Firecrawl to crawl websites and return the content as Haystack Documents. Unlike single-page fetchers, FirecrawlCrawler follows links and discovers subpages.

<div className="key-value-table">

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Most common position in a pipeline** | In indexing or query pipelines as the data fetching step |
| **Mandatory run variables** | `urls`: A list of URLs (strings) to start crawling from |
| **Output variables** | `documents`: A list of [Documents](../../concepts/data-classes.mdx) |
| **API reference** | [Firecrawl](/reference/integrations-firecrawl) |
| **GitHub link** | https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack-core-integrations/tree/main/integrations/firecrawl |
| **Package name** | `firecrawl-haystack` |

</div>

## Overview

`FirecrawlCrawler` uses [Firecrawl](https://firecrawl.dev) to crawl one or more URLs and return the extracted content as Haystack `Document` objects. Starting from each given URL, it follows links to discover subpages up to a configurable limit. This makes it well-suited for ingesting entire websites or documentation sites, not just single pages.

Firecrawl returns content in a structured format that works well as input for LLMs. Each crawled page becomes a separate `Document` with the page content in the `content` field and metadata, such as title, URL, and description, in the `meta` field.

### Crawl parameters

You can control the crawl behavior through the `params` argument. Some commonly used parameters:

- `limit`: Maximum number of pages to crawl per URL. Defaults to `1`. Without a limit, Firecrawl may crawl all subpages and consume credits quickly.
- `scrape_options`: Controls the output format. Defaults to `{"formats": ["markdown"]}`.

See the [Firecrawl API reference](https://docs.firecrawl.dev/api-reference/endpoint/crawl-post) for the full list of available parameters.

### Authorization

`FirecrawlCrawler` uses the `FIRECRAWL_API_KEY` environment variable by default. You can also pass the key explicitly at initialization:

```python
from haystack.utils import Secret
from haystack_integrations.components.fetchers.firecrawl import FirecrawlCrawler

crawler = FirecrawlCrawler(api_key=Secret.from_token("<your-api-key>"))
```

To get an API key, sign up at [firecrawl.dev](https://firecrawl.dev).

### Installation

Install the Firecrawl integration with:

```shell
pip install firecrawl-haystack
```

## Usage

### On its own

```python
from haystack_integrations.components.fetchers.firecrawl import FirecrawlCrawler

crawler = FirecrawlCrawler(params={"limit": 3})

result = crawler.run(urls=["https://docs.haystack.deepset.ai/docs/intro"])
documents = result["documents"]

for doc in documents:
    print(f"{doc.meta.get('title')} - {doc.meta.get('url')}")
```

### In a pipeline

Below is an example of an indexing pipeline that uses `FirecrawlCrawler` to crawl a documentation site and store the results in an `InMemoryDocumentStore`.

```python
from haystack import Pipeline
from haystack.document_stores.in_memory import InMemoryDocumentStore
from haystack.components.preprocessors import DocumentSplitter
from haystack.components.writers import DocumentWriter
from haystack_integrations.components.fetchers.firecrawl import FirecrawlCrawler

document_store = InMemoryDocumentStore()

crawler = FirecrawlCrawler(params={"limit": 10})
splitter = DocumentSplitter(split_by="sentence", split_length=5)
writer = DocumentWriter(document_store=document_store)

indexing_pipeline = Pipeline()
indexing_pipeline.add_component("crawler", crawler)
indexing_pipeline.add_component("splitter", splitter)
indexing_pipeline.add_component("writer", writer)

indexing_pipeline.connect("crawler.documents", "splitter.documents")
indexing_pipeline.connect("splitter.documents", "writer.documents")

indexing_pipeline.run(
    data={
        "crawler": {
            "urls": ["https://docs.haystack.deepset.ai/docs/intro"],
        },
    },
)
```
