crewai-crw

CRW web scraping tools for CrewAI — scrape, crawl, map, and search the web with AI agents.

CRW is an open-source web scraper built for AI agents. Single Rust binary, ~6 MB idle RAM, Firecrawl-compatible API.

Installation

pip install crewai crewai-crw
# or
uv add crewai crewai-crw

That's it. No server to install, no cargo install, no Docker. The crw SDK automatically downloads and manages the CRW binary for you.

Quick Start — Zero Config (Subprocess Mode)

from crewai_crw import CrwScrapeWebsiteTool

# Just works — crw SDK handles everything locally
scrape_tool = CrwScrapeWebsiteTool()

Cloud Mode (fastcrw.com)

No local binary needed. Sign up at fastcrw.com and get 500 free credits:

from crewai_crw import CrwScrapeWebsiteTool

scrape_tool = CrwScrapeWebsiteTool(
    api_url="https://fastcrw.com/api",
    api_key="crw_live_...",  # or set CRW_API_KEY env var
)

Advanced: Self-hosted Server

If you prefer running a persistent CRW server (e.g., shared across services):

# Option A: Install binary
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/us/crw/main/install.sh | bash
crw  # starts on http://localhost:3000

# Option B: Docker
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 ghcr.io/us/crw:latest

scrape_tool = CrwScrapeWebsiteTool(api_url="http://localhost:3000")

Tools

Tool	Description
CrwScrapeWebsiteTool	Scrape a single URL and get clean markdown
CrwCrawlWebsiteTool	BFS crawl a website, collect content from multiple pages
CrwMapWebsiteTool	Discover all URLs on a website
CrwSearchWebTool	Search the web and get results (cloud only)

CrewAI Example

from crewai import Agent, Task, Crew
from crewai_crw import CrwScrapeWebsiteTool

# Zero config — just works out of the box
scrape_tool = CrwScrapeWebsiteTool()

researcher = Agent(
    role="Web Researcher",
    goal="Research and summarize information from websites",
    backstory="Expert at extracting key information from web pages",
    tools=[scrape_tool],
)

task = Task(
    description="Scrape https://example.com and summarize the content",
    expected_output="A summary of the page content",
    agent=researcher,
)

crew = Crew(agents=[researcher], tasks=[task])
result = crew.kickoff()

Crawl an entire site

from crewai_crw import CrwCrawlWebsiteTool

crawl_tool = CrwCrawlWebsiteTool(
    config={
        "maxDepth": 3,
        "maxPages": 50,
        "formats": ["markdown"],
        "onlyMainContent": True,
    }
)

# Use in an agent
researcher = Agent(
    role="Deep Researcher",
    goal="Crawl documentation sites and extract comprehensive information",
    backstory="Expert at gathering information across multiple pages",
    tools=[crawl_tool],
)

Discover all URLs on a site

from crewai_crw import CrwMapWebsiteTool

map_tool = CrwMapWebsiteTool()

# Use in an agent
mapper = Agent(
    role="Site Mapper",
    goal="Discover and catalog all pages on a website",
    backstory="Expert at understanding website structure",
    tools=[map_tool],
)

Search the web (Cloud Only)

Note: Web search is a cloud-only feature. It requires api_url pointing to a CRW cloud instance (e.g. fastcrw.com). Subprocess mode is not supported for search.

from crewai_crw import CrwSearchWebTool

search_tool = CrwSearchWebTool(
    api_url="https://fastcrw.com/api",
    api_key="YOUR_KEY",
)

# Use in an agent
researcher = Agent(
    role="Web Researcher",
    goal="Find the latest information on any topic",
    backstory="Expert at searching the web for relevant information",
    tools=[search_tool],
)

Configuration

Constructor Arguments

Argument	Type	Default	Description
api_url	str | None	None	CRW server URL. If unset, uses subprocess mode (no server needed)
api_key	str | None	None	API key (required for fastcrw.com)
config	dict	varies per tool	Tool-specific configuration

Environment Variables

Both CRW_API_URL and CRW_API_KEY can be set via environment variables as fallbacks:

export CRW_API_URL=https://fastcrw.com/api  # or http://localhost:3000
export CRW_API_KEY=your_api_key              # required for cloud, optional for self-hosted

# With env vars set, no constructor args needed:
tool = CrwScrapeWebsiteTool()

Scrape Config

Key	Type	Default	Description
formats	list[str]	["markdown"]	Output formats: markdown, html, rawHtml, plainText, links, json
onlyMainContent	bool	true	Strip nav/footer/sidebar
renderJs	bool|null	null	null=auto, true=force JS, false=HTTP only
waitFor	int	—	ms to wait after JS rendering
includeTags	list[str]	[]	CSS selectors to include
excludeTags	list[str]	[]	CSS selectors to exclude

Crawl Config

Key	Type	Default	Description
maxDepth	int	2	Maximum link-follow depth
maxPages	int	10	Maximum pages to scrape
formats	list[str]	["markdown"]	Output formats per page
onlyMainContent	bool	true	Strip boilerplate

Map Config

Key	Type	Default	Description
maxDepth	int	2	Maximum discovery depth
useSitemap	bool	true	Also read sitemap.xml

Search Config (Cloud Only)

Key	Type	Default	Description
limit	int	5	Maximum number of results to return

Compared to Firecrawl Tools

Feature	crewai-crw	Firecrawl Tools
Requires SDK package	No (uses requests)	Yes (firecrawl-py)
Requires API key	No (subprocess or self-hosted)	Yes (always)
Server required	No (pip install is all you need)	Yes (always)
Self-hosted option	Yes (single binary, auto-managed)	Complex (5+ containers)
Cloud option	Yes (fastcrw.com)	Yes (firecrawl.dev)
Idle RAM	~6 MB	~500 MB+

License

MIT