Crawl4ai MCP Server

A MCP server that provides web crawling capabilities using crawl4ai with markdown output for the LLM.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Node.js
• Access to the crawl4ai instance: https://docs.crawl4ai.com/core/docker-deployment/

Setup

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/Ichigo3766/crawl4ai-mcp.git
cd crawl4ai-server

2. Install dependencies:

npm install

3. Build the server:

npm run build

4. Add the server configuration to your environment:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "crawl4ai": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": [
        "/path/to/crawl4ai-server/build/index.js"
      ],
      "env": {
        "CRAWL4AI_API_URL": "http://127.0.0.1:11235",
        "CRAWL4AI_AUTH_TOKEN": "your-auth-token"           // Optional: if authentication is needed
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace the environment variables with your values:

• CRAWL4AI_API_URL: URL of the crawl4ai API service (optional)
• CRAWL4AI_AUTH_TOKEN: Authentication token for the API (optional)

Features

Tools

• crawl_urls - Crawl web pages and get markdown content with citations
  • Parameters:
    • urls (required): List of URLs to crawl

Response Format

The tool returns markdown content with citations for each URL. Multiple URLs are separated by horizontal rules (---). Example:

This is content from the first URL [^1]

[^1]: https://example.com

---

This is content from the second URL [^2]

[^2]: https://example.org

Development

For development with auto-rebuild:

npm run watch

Error Handling

Common issues and solutions:

1. Make sure the URLs are valid and accessible
2. If using authentication, ensure the token is valid
3. Check network connectivity to the crawl4ai API service
4. For timeout errors, try reducing the number of URLs per request
5. If getting blocked by websites, the service will automatically handle retries with different user agents

License

This MCP server is licensed under the MIT License. This means you are free to use, modify, and distribute the software, subject to the terms and conditions of the MIT License. For more details, please see the LICENSE file in the project repository.