ShantyCrawl MCP

Firecrawl with a chill token footprint. 🦥🔥

Drop-in replacement for firecrawl-mcp that loads 6 tools instead of 28 on session start — saving ~18,000 tokens before you've even sent your first message.

_{Why · Quick Start · Configuration · Tool Architecture · How It Works · Local Dev · Contributing · License}

Why ShantyCrawl MCP

Most full-featured MCP servers register every tool on every session — including the ones you'll rarely touch — with full JSON schemas re-sent on each tool-list fetch. ShantyCrawl loads 6 core tools up front and lazy-loads the rest on demand, which measured out to ~18,000 fewer tokens on a fresh session in our testing:

Is This For You?

• ✅ Good fit — you use Firecrawl mostly for scrape/crawl/search, run long or multi-tool agent sessions, or are tight on context budget.
• ⚪ Less critical — you're already using tool_enable-style dynamic loading elsewhere, or you live almost entirely in the monitoring/research toolset and rarely call the core 6 — in that case the savings are smaller, since you'll be loading most of the schema anyway.

🚀 Quick Start

Run instantly via npx — no installation required:

FIRECRAWL_API_URL=http://localhost:3002 npx shantycrawl-mcp

Environment variables:

Requirements: Node.js 18+ and a reachable Firecrawl instance (self-hosted or cloud).

⚙️ Configuration

Claude Desktop

Add this to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "shantycrawl": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["shantycrawl-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FIRECRAWL_API_URL": "http://localhost:3002"
      }
    }
  }
}

OpenCode

Add this to your workspace settings:

{
  "mcp": {
    "shantycrawl": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["npx", "shantycrawl-mcp"],
      "environment": {
        "FIRECRAWL_API_URL": "http://localhost:3002"
      }
    }
  }
}

🛠️ Tool Architecture

Always Available (6 Core Tools)

... View full README on GitHub