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Lightpanda

Lightpanda is a headless browser built for AI agents and automation that loads and runs web pages without ever drawing them, so crawling, scraping, and agent browsing finish far faster and lighter than in Chrome. You drive it with the tooling you already have: Puppeteer, Playwright, and Chromedp connect over the Chrome DevTools Protocol, Selenium works over WebDriver BiDi, and existing Chrome automation scripts keep running against the new endpoint. Scripts can execute JavaScript on real pages, wait for network activity, read and mutate the DOM, submit forms, and pull structured data out of dynamic sites that plain HTTP clients cannot see. An MCP server mode hands the browser to AI applications as a callable tool, so a model can open pages, follow links, and read content in the middle of an agent workflow. The built-in agent accepts plain-language browsing tasks and can export what it did as PandaScript, a replayable JavaScript file that runs later with no model call at runtime. A fetch command loads one or more URLs and prints the result as HTML or Markdown, which turns page extraction into a single shell step inside data pipelines. In the project's published crawl benchmark it processed pages roughly nine times faster than headless Chrome at a fraction of the memory, so one server can hold many more concurrent browsing sessions. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Lightpanda
Lightpanda
Lightpanda

Benefits

  • Far Lighter Browser Sessions
  • Skipping the rendering pipeline entirely cuts peak memory dramatically versus headless Chrome, so a single VPS can hold many more concurrent crawls, scrapes, and agent sessions at once.
  • Works With Existing Tooling
  • Point Puppeteer, Playwright, or Chromedp at the CDP endpoint, or drive it with Selenium over WebDriver BiDi, and keep your current automation scripts instead of rewriting them for a new API.
  • Agent And MCP Modes
  • The built-in agent browses from plain-language instructions and exports replayable PandaScript, while the MCP server mode exposes the browser as a tool that AI applications can call directly.
  • One-Shot Page Fetching
  • The fetch command loads URLs and prints clean HTML or Markdown to stdout, so data pipelines can extract page content in one shell step without managing a browser session.

Features

  • CDP Automation Server
  • The serve command starts a Chrome DevTools Protocol server on port 9222 that Puppeteer, Playwright, and Chromedp clients connect to over WebSocket for scripted page control.
  • Native Zig Engine
  • Written from scratch in Zig with the V8 JavaScript engine and an in-memory DOM, and no rendering pipeline, so pages execute quickly with a small, predictable memory footprint.
  • MCP Browser Tool
  • The mcp command runs a Model Context Protocol server over stdio, letting LLM hosts such as AI coding tools drive the browser as a callable tool in agent workflows.
  • Built-In Browsing Agent
  • The agent command browses the web from natural-language tasks inside the browser process and records its actions as PandaScript, a JavaScript replay that needs no model at runtime.
  • WebDriver BiDi Support
  • Passing the webdriver protocol flag serves W3C WebDriver BiDi instead of CDP, so Selenium-based test suites can drive Lightpanda pages without changing their client stack or drivers.

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