AnyCrawl MCP Server

🚀 AnyCrawl MCP Server — Powerful web scraping and crawling for Cursor, Claude, and other LLM clients via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Features

• Web Scraping: Extract content from single URLs with multiple output formats
• Website Crawling: Crawl entire websites with configurable depth and limits
• Search Engine Integration: Search the web and optionally scrape results
• Multiple Engines: Support for Playwright, Cheerio, and Puppeteer
• Flexible Output: Markdown, HTML, text, screenshots, and structured JSON
• Async Operations: Non-blocking crawl jobs with status monitoring
• Error Handling: Robust error handling and logging
• Multiple Modes: STDIO (default), MCP(HTTP), SSE; cloud-ready with Nginx proxy

Installation

Running with npx

ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=YOUR-API-KEY npx -y anycrawl-mcp

Manual installation

npm install -g anycrawl-mcp-server

ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=YOUR-API-KEY anycrawl-mcp

Configuration

AnyCrawl MCP Server supports two deployment modes: Cloud Service (recommended) and Self-Hosted.

Cloud Service (Recommended)

Use the AnyCrawl cloud service at mcp.anycrawl.dev. No server setup required.

# Only need your API key
export ANYCRAWL_API_KEY="your-api-key-here"

Cloud endpoints:

• MCP (streamable_http): https://mcp.anycrawl.dev/{API_KEY}/mcp
• SSE: https://mcp.anycrawl.dev/{API_KEY}/sse

Self-Hosted Deployment

For self-hosted deployments, configure the base URL to point to your own AnyCrawl API instance:

export ANYCRAWL_API_KEY="your-api-key-here"
export ANYCRAWL_BASE_URL="https://your-api-server.com"  # Your self-hosted API URL

For local development with custom host/port:

export ANYCRAWL_HOST="127.0.0.1"  # Default: mcp.anycrawl.dev (cloud)
export ANYCRAWL_PORT="3000"       # Default: 3000

Get your API key

• Visit the AnyCrawl website and sign up or log in: AnyCrawl
• 🎉 Sign up for free to receive 1,500 credits — enough to crawl nearly 1,500 pages.
• Open the dashboard → API Keys → Copy your key.
• Copy the key and set it as the ANYCRAWL_API_KEY environment variable (see above).

Usage

Available Modes

AnyCrawl MCP Server supports the following deployment modes:

Default mode is STDIO (no env needed). Set ANYCRAWL_MODE to switch.

Quick Start Commands

# Development (local)
npm run dev            # STDIO (default)
npm run dev:mcp          # MCP mode (JSON /mcp)
npm run dev:sse          # SSE mode (/sse)

# Production (built output)
npm start              # STDIO (default)
npm run start:mcp
npm run start:sse

# Env examples
ANYCRAWL_MODE=MCP ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=YOUR-KEY npm run dev:mcp
ANYCRAWL_MODE=SSE ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=YOUR-KEY npm run dev:sse

Docker Compose (MCP + SSE with Nginx)

This repo ships a production-ready image that runs MCP (JSON) on port 3000 and SSE on port 3001 in the same container, fronted by Nginx. Nginx also supports API-key-prefixed paths /{API_KEY}/mcp and /{API_KEY}/sse and forwards the key via x-anycrawl-api-key header.

docker compose build
docker compose up -d

Environment variables used in Docker image:

• ANYCRAWL_MODE: MCP_AND_SSE (default in compose), or MCP, SSE
• ANYCRAWL_MCP_PORT: default 3000
• ANYCRAWL_SSE_PORT: default 3001
• CLOUD_SERVICE: true to extract API key from /{API_KEY}/... or headers
• ANYCRAWL_BASE_URL: default https://api.anycrawl.dev

Running on Cursor

Configuring Cursor. Note: Requires Cursor v0.45.6+.

For Cursor v0.48.6 and newer, add this to your MCP Servers settings:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anycrawl-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "anycrawl-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "ANYCRAWL_API_KEY": "YOUR-API-KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

For Cursor v0.45.6:

1. Open Cursor Settings → Features → MCP Servers → "+ Add New MCP Server"
2. Name: "anycrawl-mcp" (or your preferred name)
3. Type: "command"
4. Command:

env ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=YOUR-API-KEY npx -y anycrawl-mcp

On Windows, if you encounter issues:

cmd /c "set ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=YOUR-API-KEY && npx -y anycrawl-mcp"

Running on VS Code

For manual installation, add this JSON to your User Settings (JSON) in VS Code (Command Palette → Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON)):

{
  "mcp": {
    "inputs": [
      {
        "type": "promptString",
        "id": "apiKey",
        "description": "AnyCrawl API Key",
        "password": true
      }
    ],
    "servers": {
      "anycrawl": {
        "command": "npx",
        "args": ["-y", "anycrawl-mcp"],
        "env": {
          "ANYCRAWL_API_KEY": "${input:apiKey}"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Optionally, place the following in .vscode/mcp.json in your workspace to share config:

{
  "inputs": [
    {
      "type": "promptString",
      "id": "apiKey",
      "description": "AnyCrawl API Key",
      "password": true
    }
  ],
  "servers": {
    "anycrawl": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "anycrawl-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "ANYCRAWL_API_KEY": "${input:apiKey}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Running on Windsurf

Add this to ~/.codeium/windsurf/model_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-server-anycrawl": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "anycrawl-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "ANYCRAWL_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

Running on Claude Desktop / Claude Code

Claude Code (CLI)

Add AnyCrawl MCP server using the claude mcp add command:

claude mcp add --transport stdio anycrawl -e ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key -- npx -y anycrawl-mcp

Claude Desktop

Add this to your Claude Desktop configuration file:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anycrawl": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "anycrawl-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "ANYCRAWL_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

Running with SSE Server Mode

The SSE (Server-Sent Events) mode provides a web-based interface for MCP communication, ideal for web applications, testing, and integration with web-based LLM clients.

Quick Start

ANYCRAWL_MODE=SSE ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=YOUR-API-KEY npx -y anycrawl-mcp

# Or using npm scripts
ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=YOUR-API-KEY npm run dev:sse

Server Configuration

Optional server settings for local/self-hosted deployments:

export ANYCRAWL_PORT=3000           # Default: 3000
export ANYCRAWL_HOST=127.0.0.1      # Set to override cloud default (mcp.anycrawl.dev)

Health Check

curl -s http://localhost:${ANYCRAWL_PORT:-3000}/health
# Response: ok

Generic MCP/SSE Client Configuration

For other MCP/SSE clients that support SSE transport, use this configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anycrawl": {
      "type": "sse",
      "url": "https://mcp.anycrawl.dev/{API_KEY}/sse",
      "name": "AnyCrawl MCP Server",
      "description": "Web scraping and crawling tools"
    }
  }
}

or

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "AnyCrawl": {
      "type": "streamable_http",
      "url": "https://mcp.anycrawl.dev/{API_KEY}/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Environment Setup:

# Start SSE server with API key
ANYCRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key-here npm run dev:sse

Cursor configuration for HTTP modes (streamable_http)

Configure Cursor to connect to your HTTP MCP server.

Local HTTP Streamable Server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anycrawl-http-local": {
      "type": "streamable_http",
      "url": "http://127.0.0.1:3000/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Cloud HTTP Streamable Server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anycrawl-http-cloud": {
      "type": "streamable_http",
      "url": "https://mcp.anycrawl.dev/{API_KEY}/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Note: For HTTP modes, set ANYCRAWL_API_KEY (and optional host/port) in the server process environment or in the URL. Cursor does not need your API key when using streamable_http.

Available Tools

1. Scrape Tool (anycrawl_scrape)

Scrape a single URL and extract content in various formats.

Best for:

• Extracting content from a single page
• Quick data extraction
• Testing specific URLs

Parameters:

• url (required): The URL to scrape
• engine (required): Scraping engine (playwright, cheerio, puppeteer)
• formats (optional): Output formats (markdown, html, text, screenshot, screenshot@fullPage, rawHtml, json)
• proxy (optional): Proxy URL
• timeout (optional): Timeout in milliseconds (default: 300000)
• retry (optional): Whether to retry on failure (default: false)
• wait_for (optional): Wait time for page to load
• include_tags (optional): HTML tags to include
• exclude_tags (optional): HTML tags to exclude
• json_options (optional): Options for JSON extraction

Example:

{
  "name": "anycrawl_scrape",
  "arguments": {
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "engine": "cheerio",
    "formats": ["markdown", "html"],
    "timeout": 30000
  }
}

2. Crawl Tool (anycrawl_crawl)

Start a crawl job to scrape multiple pages from a website. By default this waits for completion and returns aggregated results using the SDK's client.crawl (defaults: poll every 3 seconds, timeout after 60 seconds).

**B

---