Case Study: Convex builds a live documentation search app with Firecrawl

Convex builds a documentation search app in under 100 lines with Firecrawl

Convex, a backend platform for developers, needed to integrate web search, scraping, and crawling capabilities into its applications. However, its serverless functions run in a sandboxed environment without network access, making direct API calls to a service like Firecrawl impossible from its core logic. This presented a challenge for building a feature-rich documentation search app that required these external web data functions.

Firecrawl solved this by providing an official Convex component. This installable package runs inside a Convex deployment, allowing Convex actions to call the Firecrawl API for search and to start durable, background crawls. As Firecrawl processes pages, it posts them directly to the Convex database via secured webhooks, enabling live, reactive updates in the UI without any polling. The solution allowed Convex to quickly build a fully functional app with under a hundred lines of backend code, demonstrating seamless integration and real-time data flow.

Convex