🔥 PyreCrawl — Web Browsing Superpowers for Your AI Agent

One command gives any AI agent the whole web. Scrape, extract, crawl, map, and search — self-hosted, no API keys, no rate limits, no subscription.

PyreCrawl speaks MCP (Model Context Protocol), the standard tool interface for Claude, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, OpenCode, Hermes, and any MCP-compatible agent.

A smart auto-fallback ladder always picks the cheapest method that succeeds:

fast HTTP
    │  (403/503/Cloudflare challenge or empty body)
    ▼
stealth browser (real Chromium + Cloudflare solver)
    │  (still blocked, or the page needs full JS rendering)
    ▼
deep processing (LLM-ready markdown, citations, structured extraction)

⚡ Tools exposed

Tool	What it does
scrape(url, prefer="auto")	Single URL → LLM-ready markdown
extract(url, schema)	Scrape + structured extraction (JsonCss schema)
map_site(root, include_pattern=None, limit=200)	Enumerate all internal URLs
crawl(root, max_pages=5, prefer="auto")	Multi-page crawl with auto-fallback per page
search(query, limit=10)	Web search via DuckDuckGo HTML (no API key)
health()	Versions + import sanity check

prefer options: "auto" (default ladder) · "fast" (HTTP only) · "stealth" (CF bypass) · "llm" (deep processing).

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🚀 Install & Use (one-liner)

1. Install

# Using uv (recommended — fast, isolated, no venv needed)
uv tool install pyrecrawl

# Or pipx (alternative)
pipx install pyrecrawl

# Or pip into a venv
pip install pyrecrawl

2. One-time browser engines

pyrecrawl setup

This installs Chromium + stealth browser engines (~2 min, one-time).

3. Register with your AI agent

# Auto-detect installed agents and write their MCP configs
pyrecrawl install

# Or target specific agents
pyrecrawl install claude-desktop cursor

# Dry-run to preview what would change
pyrecrawl install --dry-run

Supported agents: claude-desktop, claude-code, cursor, vscode, codex, opencode, hermes.

4. Start chatting

After installing + registering, restart your agent (or start a new session). Then ask:

"Scrape https://example.com and summarize it."

The tools appear as mcp_pyrecrawl_scrape, mcp_pyrecrawl_extract, mcp_pyrecrawl_map_site, mcp_pyrecrawl_crawl, mcp_pyrecrawl_search, mcp_pyrecrawl_health.

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📚 Manual config (if pyrecrawl install doesn't match your setup)

Claude Desktop

Config file

• Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %AppData%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pyrecrawl": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "pyrecrawl", "pyrecrawl", "serve"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

Config file: project-scoped .mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pyrecrawl": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "pyrecrawl", "pyrecrawl", "serve"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor

Config file: ~/.cursor/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pyrecrawl": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "pyrecrawl", "pyrecrawl", "serve"]
    }
  }
}

VS Code / Copilot

Config file: .vscode/mcp.json (project-scoped)

{
  "servers": {
    "pyrecrawl": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "pyrecrawl", "pyrecrawl", "serve"],
      "type": "stdio"
    }
  }
}

Codex CLI

Config file: ~/.codex/config.toml

[mcp_servers.pyrecrawl]
command = "uvx"
args = ["--from", "pyrecrawl", "pyrecrawl", "serve"]

OpenCode

Config file: ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json

{
  "mcp": {
    "pyrecrawl": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["uvx", "--from", "pyrecrawl", "pyrecrawl", "serve"],
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

Hermes

Config file

• Linux/macOS: ~/.hermes/config.yaml
• Windows: %LocalAppData%\hermes\config.yaml

mcp_servers:
  pyrecrawl:
    command: uvx
    args:
      - --from
      - pyrecrawl
      - pyrecrawl
      - serve
    enabled: true

Windows note: uvx must be on PATH. If not, use the full path to uvx.exe (e.g. C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\hermes\bin\uvx.exe).

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🧠 How the ladder chooses

PyreCrawl runs each request through three tiers, stopping at the first one that returns a complete, LLM-ready result:

Concern	Fast tier	Stealth tier	Deep tier
Static HTML page	✅ ~200ms	—	—
Cloudflare-protected	❌	✅ Turnstile solver	—
JS-heavy SPA	❌	✅ real Chromium	—
Live DOM data (input .value, JS state)	❌	✅ js param	—
LLM-ready markdown + citations	—	—	✅ BM25, fit-markdown
Structured extraction (CSS schema)	—	—	✅
Deep crawl (BFS/DFS/BestFirst)	—	—	✅ adaptive

The agent never has to pick. prefer="auto" does it every call.

Live DOM data with js and wait_for

Some sites keep the data you want in a DOM property (e.g. an <input>'s .value) that JS writes after an XHR — it never appears in the serialized HTML. The scrape tool accepts two stealth-tier params for exactly this:

{
  "url": "https://temp-mail.org/id",
  "prefer": "stealth",
  "wait_for": "document.getElementById('mail').value.includes('@')",
  "js": "document.getElementById('mail').value"
}

• wait_for — a JS predicate expression polled until truthy (bounded by timeout). Use it instead of guessing a sleep for anything that arrives asynchronously.
• js — a JS expression evaluated once the page settles; the value comes back in meta.js_result. Errors are captured in meta.js_error (the page result is still returned, never a crash).

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📊 Compared to Firecrawl (hosted)

	Firecrawl	PyreCrawl
Cost	Free 1k/mo, then $16–333/mo	Free, self-hosted
Local LLM support	❌	✅ Ollama / any LLM
Cloudflare bypass	✅ (Fire-Engine, paid)	✅ (free, built-in)
Markdown + BM25	✅	✅
Self-host	❌	✅
Hosted search API	✅ /search	⚠️ DuckDuckGo HTML (no key)

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🔧 Development

git clone https://github.com/SanggonBoy/PyreCrawl.git
cd PyreCrawl
uv venv --python 3.12 .venv
source .venv/Scripts/activate  # Windows; or .venv/bin/activate on macOS/Linux
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m playwright install chromium
scrapling install

Run tests

python scripts/selfcheck.py   # real-network smoke test
python scripts/probe_stdio.py # stdio JSON-RPC probe

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📦 Publish

Maintainers only:

git tag v0.2.1
git push origin v0.2.1

GitHub Actions builds + uploads to PyPI via trusted publishing.

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📜 Uninstall

# Remove from all agent configs
pyrecrawl uninstall

# Remove the package
uv tool uninstall pyrecrawl

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🛡️ License

MIT — see LICENSE.

🙏 Credits

Built on the shoulders of Scrapling and Crawl4AI — both MIT, both excellent.