Show HN: Firecrawl-Simple – Stable fork of Firecrawl optimized for self-hosting
34 points by skeptrune 2 days ago | 5 comments
Firecrawl Simple is a stripped down and stable version of firecrawl optimized for self-hosting and ease of contribution.

The upstream firecrawl repo contains the following blurb:

>This repository is in development, and we're still integrating custom modules into the mono repo. It's not fully ready for self-hosted deployment yet, but you can run it locally.

Firecrawl's API surface and general functionality were ideal for our Trieve sitesearch product, but we needed a version ready for self-hosting that was easy to contribute to and scale on Kubernetes. Therefore, we decided to fork and begin maintaining a stripped down, stable version.

Fire-engine, Firecrawl's solution for anti-bot pages, being closed source is the biggest deal breaker requiring us to maintain this fork. Further, our purposes not requiring the SaaS and AI dependencies also pushes our use-case far enough away from Firecrawl's current mission that it doesn't seem like merging into the upstream is viable at this time.

  • ramones13 a day ago |
    Cool project, a mild pet peeve with this type of thing - I have to read 75% of the README before I find out what it even does. The first bits make a huge assumption about what the reader knows.
    • skeptrune a day ago |
      Good point, agreed. I assumed that most people looking at the repo would already be familiar with Firecrawl, but there should be at least a sentence or two explaining what it does regardless.
    • DriverDaily a day ago |
      It's probably safe to assume that if you're looking for a fork of Firecrawl, you already know what Firecrawl does.
      • woleium a day ago |
        until the fork becomes more or at least similarly popular.
  • hardwaresofton a day ago |
    Finally, people starting to realize that AGPL means you can just fork and remove everything you don’t like (including branding)

    The future[0] continues to arrive.

    [0]: https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...