Obscura

The open-source headless browser for AI agents and web scraping.
Lightweight, stealthy, and built in Rust.

Obscura is a headless browser engine written in Rust, built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It runs real JavaScript via V8, supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and acts as a drop-in replacement for headless Chrome with Puppeteer and Playwright.

Why Obscura over headless Chrome?

Designed for automation at scale, not desktop browsing.

🎉 10,000 stars and what's next

We are working on Obscura Cloud the hosted version, with managed infrastructure, residential proxies, and dedicated support. For people who want the engine without operating it themselves.

The open-source engine stays Apache-2.0, fully featured. No feature gating, ever.

Get on the waitlist →
📅 Book a demo →

Sponsors

Obscura is supported by sponsors who help keep development independent.

Want to sponsor? Email hello@obscura.sh.

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Install

Download

Grab the latest binary from Releases:

# Linux x86_64
curl -LO https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/releases/latest/download/obscura-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
tar xzf obscura-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
./obscura fetch https://example.com --eval "document.title"

# Linux ARM64 (aarch64)
curl -LO https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/releases/latest/download/obscura-aarch64-linux.tar.gz
tar xzf obscura-aarch64-linux.tar.gz

# Arch Linux (AUR)
yay -S obscura-browser

# macOS Apple Silicon
curl -LO https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/releases/latest/download/obscura-aarch64-macos.tar.gz
tar xzf obscura-aarch64-macos.tar.gz

# macOS Intel
curl -LO https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/releases/latest/download/obscura-x86_64-macos.tar.gz
tar xzf obscura-x86_64-macos.tar.gz

# Windows
Download the `.zip` from the releases page and extract it manually.

No Chrome, no Node.js, no dependencies. Release archives include both obscura and obscura-worker; keep them in the same directory for the parallel scrape command.

Linux release builds target Ubuntu 22.04 so the downloaded binary remains usable on common LTS servers with glibc 2.35+.

Docker

docker run -d --name obscura -p 127.0.0.1:9222:9222 h4ckf0r0day/obscura

Image on Docker Hub. Multi-stage build on distroless/cc, no shell, no package manager, ~57 MB compressed.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura.git
cd obscura
cargo build --release

# With stealth mode (anti-detection + tracker blocking)
cargo build --release --features stealth

Requires Rust 1.75+ (rustup.rs). First build takes ~5 min (V8 compiles from source, cached after).

Quick Start

Fetch a page

# Get the page title
obscura fetch https://example.com --eval "document.title"

# Extract all links
obscura fetch https://example.com --dump links

# Render JavaScript and dump HTML
obscura fetch https://news.ycombinator.com --dump html

# Write dump or eval output to a file
obscura fetch https://example.com --dump text --output page.txt

# Stream the raw response body verbatim (binary-safe; bypasses the JS/DOM layer).
# Use this for images, JSON, JS, CSS, or any non-HTML resource.
obscura fetch https://picsum.photos/200/300 --dump original > photo.jpg

# List every sub-resource URL the page would fetch (NDJSON; one record per asset)
obscura fetch https://example.com --dump assets

# Fetch through an HTTP or SOCKS proxy
obscura --proxy socks5://127.0.0.1:1080 fetch https://example.com --dump text

# Wait for dynamic content
obscura fetch https://example.com --wait-until networkidle0

# Bound navigation time for slow or broken pages
obscura fetch https://example.com --timeout 10

Start the CDP server

obscura serve --port 9222

# With stealth mode (anti-detection + tracker blocking)
obscura serve --port 9222 --stealth

Scrape in parallel

obscura scrape url1 url2 url3 ... \
  --concurrency 25 \
  --eval "document.querySelector('h1').textContent" \
  --format json

# Suppress scrape progress on stderr for script-friendly output
obscura scrape https://example.com --quiet --format json

# Scrape workers inherit the global proxy
obscura --proxy http://127.0.0.1:8080 scrape https://example.com https://news.ycombinator.com

Puppeteer / Playwright

Puppeteer

npm install puppeteer-core

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

const browser = await puppeteer.connect({
  browserWSEndpoint: 'ws://127.0.0.1:9222/devtools/browser',
});

const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://news.ycombinator.com');

const stories = await page.evaluate(() =>
  Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.titleline > a'))
    .map(a => ({ title: a.textContent, url: a.href }))
);
console.log(stories);

await browser.disconnect();

Playwright

npm install playwright-core

import { chromium } from 'playwright-core';

const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP({
  endpointURL: 'ws://127.0.0.1:9222',
});

const page = await browser.newContext().then(ctx => ctx.newPage());
await page.goto('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping');
console.log(await page.title());

await browser.close();

Form submission & login

await page.goto('https://quotes.toscrape.com/login');
await page.evaluate(() => {
  document.querySelector('#username').value = 'admin';
  document.querySelector('#password').value = 'admin';
  document.querySelector('form').submit();
});
// Obscura handles the POST, follows the 302 redirect, maintains cookies

Benchmarks

Page load:

The full benchmark suite (WPT conformance, obstacle course, real-world corpus, and vs-Chrome speed) lives in a separate repo: https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura-benchmark

Stealth Mode

Enable with --features stealth.

Anti-fingerprinting

• Per-session fingerprint randomization (GPU, screen, canvas, audio, battery)
• Realistic navigator.userAgentData (Chrome 145, high-entropy values)
• event.isTrusted = true for dispatched events
• Hidden internal properties (Object.keys(window) safe)
• Native function masking (Function.prototype.toString() → [native code])
• navigator.webdriver = undefined (matches real Chrome)

Tracker Blocking

• 3,520 domains blocked
• Blocks analytics, ads, telemetry, and fingerprinting scripts
• Prevents trackers from loading entirely
• Enabled automatically with --stealth

CDP API

Obscura implements the Chrome DevTools Protocol for Puppeteer/Playwright compatibility.

To download a large resource without one giant Network.getResponseBody blob, call Fetch.takeResponseBodyAsStream then read it in chunks with IO.read / IO.close. Response bodies over the cache limit (OBSCURA_NETWORK_BODY_BUFFER_BYTES, default 2 MiB) are not retained, so raise that limit when you intend to stream large downloads.

CLI Reference

Tuning V8

Obscura embeds V8 directly. Use --v8-flags to pass raw flags through to V8, same syntax as Chromium's --js-flags and Node's command-line flags. Most common use is raising the heap cap to fix JavaScript heap out of memory on JS-heavy pages:

obscura --v8-flags "--max-old-space-size=4096" fetch <url>

Heavy SPAs (script execution budget)

Obscura caps the page's script-execution phase so one slow or hung page cannot stall a worker. The default budget is 30s; pages that finish sooner return immediately, so the cap only affects pages that keep running. A very heavy React/Vue/Angular SPA on a slow network can need more time to boot before it fires its data requests. Raise the budget with OBSCURA_SCRIPT_DEADLINE_MS (milliseconds), and pair it with a matching navigation timeout in your CDP client:

OBSCURA_SCRIPT_DEADLINE_MS=60000 obscura serve --port 9222

obscura serve

Start a CDP WebSocket server.

obscura fetch <URL>

Fetch and render a single page.

obscura scrape <URL...>

Scrape multiple URLs in parallel with worker processes.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Obscura ships an MCP server that exposes browser automation tools to AI agents (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.).

Start

stdio (default) — for Claude Desktop and MCP clients that launch a subprocess:

obscura mcp

HTTP — for clients that connect over the network:

obscura mcp --http --port 8080
# endpoint: http://127.0.0.1:8080/mcp

Optional flags (both transports):

Claude Desktop config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "obscura": {
      "command": "obscura",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

Integrations

• Hermes agent plugin: run Hermes agent browser tasks on Obscura. The plugin spawns obscura serve per session (or connects to an already running server) and drives it over CDP, with optional --stealth.

License

Apache 2.0