firecrawl-parse

Convert local documents-PDF, DOCX, XLSX, HTML, and more-to clean markdown saved to disk.

- Supports 8+ file formats including PDF, DOCX, DOC, ODT, RTF, XLSX, XLS, and HTML variants

- Includes AI-powered summarization (-S flag) and question-answering (-Q flag) to extract insights directly from parsed content

- Outputs to .firecrawl/ directory to avoid bloating context; handles files up to 50 MB with per-page credit consumption

- Use for local files only; prefer firecrawl-scrape for URLs

firecrawl parse

Turn a local document into clean markdown on disk. Supports PDF, DOCX, DOC, ODT, RTF, XLSX, XLS, HTML/HTM/XHTML.

When to use

- You have a file on disk (not a URL) and want its text as markdown

- User drops a PDF/DOCX and asks what it says, or to summarize it

- Use scrape instead when the source is a URL

Quick start

Always save to .firecrawl/ with -o - parsed docs can be hundreds of KB and blow up context if streamed to stdout. Add .firecrawl/ to .gitignore.

mkdir -p .firecrawl

# File → markdown
firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -o .firecrawl/paper.md