firecrawl-developer-search

Original：🇺🇸 English

Translated

Search an index built for coding agents — GitHub issues, merged pull requests, repository READMEs, and curated documentation sites — and get back the matched passages, not just links. Use this skill whenever the question is about code: how a library, framework, or API behaves, what an error message or stack trace means, whether a bug was reported or fixed, what a function returns, what a default is, or which repos do a given thing. Triggers on "why does <library> do X", "what does this error mean", "is this a known bug", "how do I use <library>", "what's the API for", pasted stack traces, and pasted error strings. Prefer this over a general web search for programming questions — it answers from the primary source instead of a blog post about it.

4installs

Sourcefirecrawl/firecrawl-grok-plugin

Added on2026-10-01

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add firecrawl/firecrawl-grok-plugin firecrawl-developer-search

SKILL.md Content

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firecrawl developer search

Via the Firecrawl MCP (preferred)

This plugin bundles the Firecrawl MCP server. When it's connected, prefer the native firecrawl_developer_search
tool over the CLI — it needs no local install and authenticates through the plugin's one-time browser sign-in. The

firecrawl

CLI commands below are the fallback for when the MCP isn't connected.

Semantic search over indexed developer sources. Each result carries an

id

, a

url

, a title, and the matched passages in markdown, so tables and code blocks survive intact.

The

id

prefix tells you what kind of source a hit is:

doc:

,

issue:

,

pull_request:

, or

readme:

.

When to use

The question is about code behaviour, a library or framework, an API contract, an error message, or a known bug
You want the issue that reported it, the merged PR that fixed it, or the doc page that defines the contract — not a blog post describing it
Before falling back to a general web search: reach for the index first, the open web second

Not for this skill: comparisons and opinions ("X vs Y"), news and outages, or a project with no public repo or indexed docs. Those are firecrawl-search plus firecrawl-scrape questions.

Quick start

MCP (preferred):

text

firecrawl_developer_search(query: "tokio select cancellation safety", k: 10)
firecrawl_developer_search(query: "agent skill frontmatter conventions", skills: "only")

CLI fallback:

bash

# Ask a developer question
firecrawl developer "axum middleware ordering" --limit 10 -o .firecrawl/dev-axum-middleware.json --json

# Search a literal error string plus the library name
firecrawl developer "ERR_REQUIRE_ESM in vitest config" -o .firecrawl/dev-esm-error.json --json

Put all scoping intent in the query text — the repo slug, the library name, the version, the error string. Semantic retrieval handles the scoping; there are no repo or type flags on the MCP tool or the CLI.

Options

Option (MCP)	Option (CLI)	Description
`query`	`<query>`	Natural-language question or search phrase (required)
`k`	`--limit <n>`	Number of ranked results, 1–100 (default 10)
`skills`	—	Set to `"only"` to search only agent-skill files
—	`-o, --output <path>`	Output file path
—	`--json` / `--pretty`	JSON output, compact or pretty

Tips

Match the query to the question. A literal error message wants the error string plus the library name. A conceptual "how do I do X" wants the whole question in natural language.
Volatile parts hurt a match. If an error string returns nothing, strip paths, line numbers, ids, and addresses and retry — the invariant middle of the message is what's indexed.
A merge supersedes a report. When an issue and a pull request disagree, the merged PR is the current behaviour. Read the resolution before answering, never the opening report alone.
Quote the passage, cite the
url
. The passages are the evidence — hand them over rather than paraphrasing into a claim the user can't check.
```
title
```
is often absent on
```
doc:
```
hits; fall back to
```
url
```
.
Raise
k
before giving up, and scrape when a hit is the right page. If a result is clearly the right page but the passage is the wrong part of it, scrape its
```
url
```
for the whole thing.
Already running a web search?
```
firecrawl_search(query, categories: ["developer"])
```
folds developer hits into the same call as web results (they come back tagged
```
category: "developer"
```
). It exposes no passage control, so prefer the dedicated tool when the question is purely a code question.
With the CLI, write results to
```
.firecrawl/
```
with
```
-o
```
to keep the context window clean. Naming convention:
```
.firecrawl/dev-{topic}.json
```
.