Self-hosting Questions
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.3 Replies
@Adobe.Flash @rafaelmiller -- 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.
hey @JasonV 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.
Got it. Appreciate your response!