Installation

To install the Firecrawl Python SDK, you can use pip:

pip install firecrawl-py

Usage

  1. Get an API key from firecrawl.dev
  2. Set the API key as an environment variable named FIRECRAWL_API_KEY or pass it as a parameter to the FirecrawlApp class.

Here’s an example of how to use the SDK:

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp

# Initialize the FirecrawlApp with your API key
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key='your_api_key')

# Scrape a single URL
url = 'https://mendable.ai'
scraped_data = app.scrape_url(url)

# Crawl a website
crawl_url = 'https://mendable.ai'
params = {
    'pageOptions': {
        'onlyMainContent': True
    }
}
crawl_result = app.crawl_url(crawl_url, params=params)

Scraping a URL

To scrape a single URL, use the scrape_url method. It takes the URL as a parameter and returns the scraped data as a dictionary.

url = 'https://example.com'
scraped_data = app.scrape_url(url)

Extracting structured data from a URL

With LLM extraction, you can easily extract structured data from any URL. We support pydanti schemas to make it easier for you too. Here is how you to use it:

class ArticleSchema(BaseModel):
    title: str
    points: int 
    by: str
    commentsURL: str

class TopArticlesSchema(BaseModel):
    top: List[ArticleSchema] = Field(..., max_items=5, description="Top 5 stories")

data = app.scrape_url('https://news.ycombinator.com', {
    'extractorOptions': {
        'extractionSchema': TopArticlesSchema.model_json_schema(),
        'mode': 'llm-extraction'
    },
    'pageOptions':{
        'onlyMainContent': True
    }
})
print(data["llm_extraction"])

Crawling a Website

To crawl a website, use the crawl_url method. It takes the starting URL and optional parameters as arguments. The params argument allows you to specify additional options for the crawl job, such as the maximum number of pages to crawl, allowed domains, and the output format.

The wait_until_done parameter determines whether the method should wait for the crawl job to complete before returning the result. If set to True, the method will periodically check the status of the crawl job until it is completed or the specified timeout (in seconds) is reached. If set to False, the method will return immediately with the job ID, and you can manually check the status of the crawl job using the check_crawl_status method.

crawl_url = 'https://example.com'
params = {
    'crawlerOptions': {
        'excludes': ['blog/*'],
        'includes': [], # leave empty for all pages
        'limit': 1000,
    },
    'pageOptions': {
        'onlyMainContent': True
    }
}
crawl_result = app.crawl_url(crawl_url, params=params, wait_until_done=True, timeout=5)

If wait_until_done is set to True, the crawl_url method will return the crawl result once the job is completed. If the job fails or is stopped, an exception will be raised.

Checking Crawl Status

To check the status of a crawl job, use the check_crawl_status method. It takes the job ID as a parameter and returns the current status of the crawl job.

job_id = crawl_result['jobId']
status = app.check_crawl_status(job_id)

Search for a query

Used to search the web, get the most relevant results, scrap each page and return the markdown.

query = 'what is mendable?'
search_result = app.search(query)

Error Handling

The SDK handles errors returned by the Firecrawl API and raises appropriate exceptions. If an error occurs during a request, an exception will be raised with a descriptive error message.