Self-hosting Questions | Firecrawl | Page 1

wide glen Oct 30, 2024, 10:00 PM

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Before I jump on the hosted product, I like to test locally. Does self-hosted Firecrawl support:

Javscript / SPAs? In my testing, it seems no. The results are empty.
Reading files from arbitrary URIs, including file:///path/to/localFile.pdf? I tried something similar, but clearly wget

Thanks.

wide glen Oct 31, 2024, 6:44 PM

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@cold sedge @zealous ibex -- any thoughts on this? If I can't do the basics, I'll need to move onto something like Jina or my homegrown system. Was hoping to make this work. Thanks.

zealous ibex Oct 31, 2024, 6:51 PM

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hey @wide glen Thanks for reaching out! Our self-hosted setup doesn’t include all the scraping strategies available in the API. By default, it uses a basic Playwright instance and lacks many of the advanced services we offer for handling complex scraping tasks.

Just giving you 2 examples related to what you said:

PDF Handling: We use Llama Parse for PDFs in the hosted version, so for self-hosting, you’ll need to configure it separately with an API key.
Actions: Our proprietary scraping services handle actions within the browser (like interacting with JavaScript/SPAs), which aren’t available in the self-hosted setup.

These are just two examples from a range of features that come with the API. If you'd like, the free plan includes 500 credits, which should allow you to test these features in the API.

#Self-hosting Questions