# Firecrawl (self-hosted)

> Firecrawl's repo (formerly mendableai/firecrawl) is the source of the hosted Firecrawl API. Self-hosting runs the API, workers, Playwright, Redis, RabbitMQ and PostgreSQL via Docker Compose and covers scrape, crawl, map and search. Licence is AGPL-3.0 (SDKs MIT). The self-hosted stack does NOT include Fire-engine (advanced anti-bot handling), screenshots, page actions or Agent and Interact features; LLM extraction needs an OpenAI-compatible provider or Ollama. The default API has no authentication. Firecrawl respects robots.txt by default.

- Repository: https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl
- Official docs: https://docs.firecrawl.dev/contributing/self-host
- Checked: 2026-10-16

## What it replaces
- Firecrawl Cloud: Crawl a site to Markdown, Scrape pages (JS-heavy and bot-protected), Structured data extraction, Web search with page content (partial). Core scrape, crawl, map and search only; no Fire-engine anti-bot handling, screenshots, actions or Agent features when self-hosted.

## Facts, with sources

| Question | Status | Answer | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs on my machine? | Confirmed | Yes, self-hosted with Docker Compose (API on port 3002) | https://docs.firecrawl.dev/contributing/self-host | 2026-10-15 |
| Code licence | Partial | AGPL-3.0 (copyleft); SDKs and some UI components MIT | https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl#license | 2026-10-15 |
| Model weights licence | Confirmed | No separate model weights; LLM features use the provider you connect | https://docs.firecrawl.dev/contributing/self-host | 2026-10-15 |
| Commercial use | Partial | Yes, under AGPL-3.0 copyleft terms (offer source of modified versions run as a network service) | https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl/blob/main/LICENSE | 2026-10-15 |
| Paid services needed? | Confirmed | None required for scrape, crawl, map and search; LLM extraction can use Ollama or a paid API | https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl/blob/main/SELF_HOST.md | 2026-10-15 |
| Hardware | Unknown | No minimum host size published; needs Docker capacity for several services | https://docs.firecrawl.dev/contributing/self-host | 2026-10-15 |
| Operating systems | Unknown | Self-hosting explicitly requires Docker Engine or Docker Desktop and Compose v2, but does not publish a Windows/macOS/Linux host test matrix or native-build support statement | https://docs.firecrawl.dev/contributing/self-host | 2026-10-16 |
| Setup effort | Confirmed | Medium, Docker Compose stack of several services; production needs your own auth, TLS and persistence | https://docs.firecrawl.dev/contributing/self-host | 2026-10-15 |

GitHub: 191999 stars, 10152 forks, last push 2026-10-16, archived: no.
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Source: RepoQuarry (https://repoquarry.dev/projects/firecrawl). Data licence: CC BY 4.0. Quotes are from project documentation and belong to their authors.