Lightpanda

<p align="center"> <a href="https://lightpanda.io"><img src="https://cdn.lightpanda.io/assets/images/logo/lpd-logo.png" alt="Logo" height=170></a> </p> <h1 align="center">Lightpanda Browser</h1> <p align="center"> <strong>The headless browser built from scratch for AI agents and automation.</strong><br> Not a Chromium fork. Not a WebKit patch. A new browser, written in Zig. </p> </div> <div align="center"> </div> <div align="center">

<img width="350px" src="https://cdn.lightpanda.io/assets/images/github/execution-time-v2.svg">   <img width="350px" src="https://cdn.lightpanda.io/assets/images/github/memory-frame-v2.svg">

</div>

Benchmarks

Requesting 933 real web pages over the network on a AWS EC2 m5.large instance. See benchmark details.

Metric	Lightpanda	Headless Chrome	Difference
Memory (peak, 100 pages)	123MB	2GB	~16 less
Execution time (100 pages)	5s	46s	~9x faster

Quick start

Install

Install from the nightly builds

You can download the last binary from the nightly builds for Linux x86_64 and MacOS aarch64.

For Linux

curl -L -o lightpanda https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser/releases/download/nightly/lightpanda-x86_64-linux && \
chmod a+x ./lightpanda

Verify the binary before running anything:

./lightpanda version

Linux aarch64 is also available

Note: The Linux release binaries are linked against glibc. On musl-based distros (Alpine, etc.) the binary fails with cannot execute: required file not found because the glibc dynamic linker is missing. Use a glibc-based base image (e.g., FROM debian:bookworm-slim or FROM ubuntu:24.04) or build from sources.

For MacOS

curl -L -o lightpanda https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser/releases/download/nightly/lightpanda-aarch64-macos && \
chmod a+x ./lightpanda

MacOS x86_64 is also available

For Windows + WSL2

Lightpanda has no native Windows binary. Install it inside WSL following the Linux steps above.

WSL not installed? Run wsl --install from an administrator shell, restart, then open wsl. See Microsoft's WSL install guide for details.

Your automation client (Puppeteer, Playwright, etc.) can run either inside WSL or on the Windows host. WSL forwards localhost:9222 automatically.

Install from Docker

Lightpanda provides official Docker images for both Linux amd64 and arm64 architectures. The following command fetches the Docker image and starts a new container exposing Lightpanda's CDP server on port 9222.

docker run -d --name lightpanda -p 127.0.0.1:9222:9222 lightpanda/browser:nightly

Dump a URL

./lightpanda fetch --obey-robots --dump html --log-format pretty  --log-level info https://demo-browser.lightpanda.io/campfire-commerce/

You can use --dump markdown to convert directly into markdown. --wait-until, --wait-ms, --wait-selector and --wait-script are available to adjust waiting time before dump.

Start a CDP server

./lightpanda serve --obey-robots --log-format pretty  --log-level info --host 127.0.0.1 --port 9222

Once the CDP server started, you can run a Puppeteer script by configuring the browserWSEndpoint.

<details> <summary>Example Puppeteer script</summary>

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

// use browserWSEndpoint to pass the Lightpanda's CDP server address.
const browser = await puppeteer.connect({
  browserWSEndpoint: "ws://127.0.0.1:9222",
});

// The rest of your script remains the same.
const context = await browser.createBrowserContext();
const page = await context.newPage();

// Dump all the links from the page.
await page.goto('https://demo-browser.lightpanda.io/amiibo/', {waitUntil: "networkidle0"});

const links = await page.evaluate(() => {
  return Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('a')).map(row => {
    return row.getAttribute('href');
  });
});

console.log(links);

await page.close();
await context.close();
await browser.disconnect();

</details>

Native MCP and skill

The MCP server communicates via MCP JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio.

Add to your MCP configuration: