ICEcrawl

Self-hosted Firecrawl-alternative for personal use: crawl + JS-render + markdown-convert web pages via Crawl4AI, with optional Claude-powered structured extraction, behind a small job-queued HTTP API, all in Docker Compose on one machine.

Architecture: FastAPI (api) accepts jobs → Redis/RQ queue → Python worker containers call the Crawl4AI container's REST API for fetch/render/ markdown, then (optionally) the Claude Messages API for extraction → results land in SQLite on a shared volume → clients poll job/crawl endpoints.

Status: verified working end-to-end (2026-07-22). docker compose up, /healthz, a real scrape of a live site, and both extraction endpoints (real Claude API calls) have all been tested against a running stack. See DEVIATIONS.md for the one real bug that turned up during that verification and how it was fixed — it's already applied here.

What you need before you start

• Docker Desktop (or another Docker Compose-compatible runtime) installed and running.

• Two values to put in a config file (below): any random password you make up yourself, and — only if you want AI-powered data extraction, not just plain scraping — an Anthropic API key from console.anthropic.com. Without a key, everything except the extract feature works fine.

Related MCP server: UnWeb MCP Server

Quickstart

cp .env.example .env

Open .env in any text editor and fill in:

• SCRAPER_API_KEY — make up any long random string, e.g. openssl rand -hex 32. This is the password your own requests will use.

• CRAWL4AI_API_TOKEN — same idea, another random string. Required for the containers to talk to each other correctly.

• ANTHROPIC_API_KEY — optional, only needed for the extract feature.

Then, from this folder:

docker compose up -d --build

The first run pulls a few images and can take a few minutes. Once docker compose ps shows everything healthy:

curl http://localhost:8080/healthz

should return {"status": "ok", "redis": true, "db": true, "crawl4ai": true}. If crawl4ai shows false, give it another 10-20 seconds and retry — it's usually still starting up.

That's it — the API is live at http://localhost:8080.

Scale workers if you're running a lot of jobs at once (each worker holds a Chromium page in the crawl4ai container while a job is in flight):

docker compose up -d --scale worker=4

API reference

All endpoints except /healthz require X-API-Key: <SCRAPER_API_KEY> (the value you put in .env). All bodies are JSON. Errors are {"error": {"code": "<UPPER_SNAKE>", "message": "..."}}.

Scrape a single page

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/scrape \
  -H "X-API-Key: $SCRAPER_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "wait": true}'

Fire-and-poll instead of waiting:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/scrape \
  -H "X-API-Key: $SCRAPER_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com"}'
# -> {"job_id": "...", "status": "queued", "status_url": "/v1/jobs/..."}

curl http://localhost:8080/v1/jobs/<job_id> -H "X-API-Key: $SCRAPER_API_KEY"

Scrape with structured extraction (requires ANTHROPIC_API_KEY):

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/scrape \
  -H "X-API-Key: $SCRAPER_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "wait": true,
    "extract": {
      "schema": {"type": "object", "properties": {"title": {"type": "string"}}, "required": ["title"]},
      "prompt": "Extract the page title"
    }
  }'

Crawl a site (depth/page-limited BFS)

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/crawl \
  -H "X-API-Key: $SCRAPER_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://books.toscrape.com/", "max_depth": 1, "max_pages": 5}'
# -> {"crawl_id": "...", "status_url": "/v1/crawls/..."}

curl http://localhost:8080/v1/crawls/<crawl_id> -H "X-API-Key: $SCRAPER_API_KEY"

# with full page results, paginated:
curl "http://localhost:8080/v1/crawls/<crawl_id>?include=results&limit=50&offset=0" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $SCRAPER_API_KEY"

curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/v1/crawls/<crawl_id> -H "X-API-Key: $SCRAPER_API_KEY"

Recommended pattern for extraction on a crawl: crawl without extract first (extraction on every page of a crawl multiplies Claude calls by page count — the response echoes estimated_extraction_calls as a warning when extract is present), then run /v1/extract selectively on the pages you actually want structured data from.

Extract structured data from raw content (no fetch, synchronous)

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/extract \
  -H "X-API-Key: $SCRAPER_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "content": "# Hello World\n\nThis page is about widgets.",
    "schema": {"type": "object", "properties": {"title": {"type": "string"}}, "required": ["title"]}
  }'

Returns {"extraction": {...}, "extraction_meta": {"model", "input_tokens", "output_tokens", "validation_errors", "truncated"}}. 422 if ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is not configured (EXTRACTION_UNCONFIGURED), or if content/schema fail validation.

Using it from Claude (MCP server)

mcp-server/ wraps the HTTP API as two Claude-friendly tools — parse (one page) and scrape (a whole domain, following internal links). This is optional; the HTTP API above works fine on its own.

cd mcp-server
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then register it with Claude Code:

claude mcp add icecrawl --scope user \
  --env ICECRAWL_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8080 \
  --env SCRAPER_API_KEY=<same key as your .env> \
  -- /full/path/to/mcp-server/.venv/bin/python /full/path/to/mcp-server/server.py

(For Claude Desktop, add the same command/env under mcpServers in its config file instead.)

By default, every completed parse/scrape also saves a markdown note to ~/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/My Brain/LLM World/ICEcrawl — that's an Obsidian vault path specific to the original author's machine. If you don't have (or want) that, set ICECRAWL_OBSIDIAN_DIR to any folder on your own machine, or just ignore it — it'll create that folder path the first time it saves a note.

Security notes

• Single static API key (X-API-Key), constant-time compared. No TLS — this service is meant to sit on localhost/LAN, not the public internet. Put a reverse proxy with real TLS + auth in front before ever exposing it publicly.

• SSRF guard: every URL that reaches crawl4ai is checked first — it rejects loopback/private/link-local/reserved/multicast/unique-local addresses (including the cloud metadata IP 169.254.169.254) and non-http(s) schemes. allow_private: true (default false) opts a specific request out of the private/reserved range check for deliberately scraping your own LAN hosts — loopback and link-local stay blocked even then.

  • Residual risk: this is a pre-fetch check only; a public URL that redirects (or DNS-rebinds) to an internal address can still be fetched. Compensating control: redis and crawl4ai aren't published to the host, and the whole stack is meant to stay off the public internet.

• ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is read only from .env at container runtime, never baked into the image, never logged, never returned by any endpoint.

• Request bodies are capped at 2 MB; /v1/extract content is separately capped at 200,000 characters.

Known limitations

Cost trade-offs (single glance)

• Haiku default vs Sonnet override — Sonnet-class is roughly 10x the per-token price of Haiku-class; override (extract.model) only when a page is hard enough to need it.

• EXTRACT_MAX_INPUT_CHARS / EXTRACT_MAX_TOKENS in .env are the two spend knobs; defaults (120,000 chars / 4096 tokens) are conservative.

• No Claude call ever happens implicitly — extraction only runs when a request explicitly includes extract or hits /v1/extract.

Development

docker compose run --rm api pytest          # full suite inside the container
docker compose run --rm api pytest -m "not integration"  # skip the live crawl4ai check

115 tests pass (1 deselected without -m "not integration" — the live crawl4ai integration test self-skips outside a running compose stack).