How to Install and Use Firecrawl Skills in OpenClaw

Open your terminal and run the ClawHub install command to add Firecrawl Skills to your OpenClaw installation. ClawHub is OpenClaw's built-in skill registry — think of it as an app store for OpenClaw capabilities. Installing a skill downloads it and registers it with your OpenClaw instance so it becomes available in chat. The install command is straightforward: ``` clawhub install firecrawl-skills ``` This fetches the latest stable version of the firecrawl-skills package and adds it to your OpenClaw skills directory. The installation typically completes in under 30 seconds. After installation, verify it appears in your skills list by running: ``` clawhub list ``` You should see `firecrawl-skills` listed with its version number. If you already have `firecrawl-search` installed, note that these are two distinct skills — firecrawl-skills provides the crawl, scrape, and map toolkit while firecrawl-search handles search-query style interactions. Both use the same API key, so you only need to configure credentials once if you install both. Do not confuse the two: firecrawl-skills will be the tool of choice when you need to extract data from known URLs across multiple pages, while firecrawl-search is better for discovery queries where you do not know the specific URLs ahead of time.

1# Install the Firecrawl Skills toolkit
2clawhub install firecrawl-skills
3
4# Confirm installation
5clawhub list | grep firecrawl

Firecrawl Skills requires a valid Firecrawl API key to make requests to the Firecrawl service. The API key authenticates your OpenClaw instance with Firecrawl's servers and determines which plan limits apply to your crawls. To get your API key: 1. Go to firecrawl.dev and sign up for an account (a free tier is available). 2. After signing in, navigate to your dashboard at app.firecrawl.dev. 3. Find the 'API Keys' section — it's typically in the sidebar under your account settings. 4. Click 'Create API Key' or 'Generate New Key'. Give it a descriptive name like 'OpenClaw Integration'. 5. Copy the key immediately — it starts with `fc-` followed by a long alphanumeric string. Firecrawl's free tier allows a limited number of pages per month, which is sufficient for testing and small projects. For larger crawls (hundreds or thousands of pages), check Firecrawl's paid plans on their pricing page. Keep your API key secure — it controls your Firecrawl account usage and billing. Do not share it or commit it to version control. You will store it in OpenClaw's config in the next step, not in any code file.

With your API key in hand, you need to add it to OpenClaw's configuration so the firecrawl-skills skill can authenticate with Firecrawl's API. OpenClaw stores skill credentials in its config file or a .env file in your OpenClaw directory — not in any application code. There are two ways to configure the API key: **Option 1: Using the OpenClaw config command (recommended)** Run the following in your terminal: ``` openclaw config set skills.firecrawl-skills.apikey YOUR_API_KEY_HERE ``` This writes the key to OpenClaw's encrypted config store, which is the safest approach. **Option 2: Using a .env file in your OpenClaw directory** If you prefer environment variable style configuration, open (or create) the `.env` file in your OpenClaw data directory and add: ``` FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=fc-your-key-here ``` After saving, restart OpenClaw or run `openclaw reload` for the change to take effect. To verify the key was loaded correctly, run a quick config check: ``` openclaw config get skills.firecrawl-skills.apikey ``` This should return the masked version of your key (e.g., `fc-****...****`). If you are setting up OpenClaw for a team, the config command approach is preferable — keys stored via `openclaw config set` are encrypted at rest and are not exposed in file listings. The .env approach works well for local development but should not be committed to version control.

1# Option 1: Store via OpenClaw config (recommended)
2openclaw config set skills.firecrawl-skills.apikey YOUR_API_KEY_HERE
3
4# Option 2: Store in .env file
5echo 'FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=fc-your-key-here' >> ~/.openclaw/.env
6
7# Verify key is loaded
8openclaw config get skills.firecrawl-skills.apikey

With the skill installed and configured, open OpenClaw chat and try your first crawl. The firecrawl-skills skill responds to natural language instructions — you describe what you want to crawl and what data to extract, and it handles the Firecrawl API calls behind the scenes. Start with a single-page scrape to confirm the skill is working: After confirming single-page scraping works, try a multi-page crawl. Note that crawls take longer than single-page scrapes — a 50-page crawl might take 30-60 seconds depending on page load times. OpenClaw will stream progress updates as pages are crawled. You can also use the mapping mode to understand a site's structure without downloading all content: The site map returns a list of all discovered URLs, which you can then use to decide which specific pages to scrape. If the skill responds with an authentication error, go back to Step 3 and verify your API key configuration. If it times out on large crawls, add a page limit to your prompt (e.g., 'limit to 30 pages').

Once basic crawling is working, Firecrawl Skills supports more sophisticated extraction patterns that are particularly useful for data pipelines and research workflows. **Structured data extraction**: Ask for data in a specific format by describing the fields you want. Firecrawl's AI-powered extraction can identify and pull specific data points even from unstructured pages. **Depth-controlled crawling**: By default, crawls follow links to a configurable depth. Specify depth in your prompt to control how far from the starting URL the crawl goes — depth 1 means the start page plus all directly linked pages, depth 2 adds pages linked from those, and so on. **Domain restriction**: Tell the skill to stay within a specific subdomain or path prefix to avoid crawling the entire internet from a single starting link. **Combining map + scrape**: A powerful workflow is to first map a site to get all URLs, review the list, and then selectively scrape only the relevant pages. This avoids wasting API credits on irrelevant pages. For power users managing multiple crawl jobs, the RapidDev team provides OpenClaw configuration templates and batch prompt libraries for common crawl-and-extract pipelines — contact support at rapiddev.ai if you need help setting up high-volume extraction workflows beyond what the skill's defaults support. Finally, always check the robots.txt of any site before running large crawls (`https://example.com/robots.txt`). Firecrawl respects robots.txt by default, but understanding a site's crawl policies is good practice.

1# Example: Check robots.txt before crawling
2curl https://target-site.com/robots.txt
3
4# Example: OpenClaw config for crawl depth limit
5openclaw config set skills.firecrawl-skills.default_depth 2
6openclaw config set skills.firecrawl-skills.max_pages 100