Obscura

Use Obscura as a lightweight, stealth-capable Rust headless browser for automation. It embeds V8, owns the DOM and rendering pipeline, and exposes Chrome DevTools Protocol workflows without launching Chromium. Treat rendering and stealth as first-class, complementary capabilities.

Build variants

Official release archives and Docker images include rendering. For a source checkout, build release mode with the render feature:

CARGO_INCREMENTAL=0 CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=2 cargo build --release -p obscura-cli --bins --features render

Build rendering and stealth together for the wreq/BoringSSL transport, browser-identity protections, and tracker blocking:

CARGO_INCREMENTAL=0 CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=2 cargo build --release -p obscura-cli --bins --features render,stealth

Build without rendering when only DOM, extraction, or CDP automation is needed:

CARGO_INCREMENTAL=0 CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=2 cargo build --release -p obscura-cli --bins --no-default-features
CARGO_INCREMENTAL=0 CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=2 cargo build --release -p obscura-cli --bins --no-default-features --features stealth

Use ./target/release/obscura in the commands below when working from source.

Use stealth

The stealth build keeps the complete rendering, screenshot, screencast, PDF, CDP, and MCP surface. It adds a consistent browser fingerprint across TLS, HTTP headers, user agent, navigator, and WebGL surfaces; masks navigator.webdriver; masks patched native functions; and blocks the built-in tracker-domain list.

Enable stealth at runtime with the global --stealth flag. It applies to fetch, serve, scrape, and mcp, before or after the subcommand:

obscura --stealth fetch https://example.com --screenshot page.png
obscura serve --stealth --port 9222

The runtime flag needs a render,stealth build for the wreq/BoringSSL transport.

Fetch, evaluate, and capture

obscura fetch https://example.com --dump text
obscura fetch https://example.com --eval "document.title"
obscura fetch https://example.com --screenshot page.png
obscura fetch https://example.com \
  --eval "window.scrollTo(0, document.documentElement.scrollHeight)" \
  --screenshot bottom.png

The CLI screenshot path writes PNG and accepts one URL. An omitted --wait uses adaptive settling with a five-second cap. An explicit --wait N is a fixed delay of N seconds. --timeout is also measured in seconds and bounds navigation separately.

Use --dump original for a binary or raw HTTP response that should bypass DOM and JavaScript processing. Use scrape for many URLs when the requested output does not require one screenshot per URL.

Drive CDP

Start the server:

obscura serve --port 9222

Connect Puppeteer with puppeteer-core or Playwright with chromium.connectOverCDP. Standard page.screenshot() supports viewport and full-page capture; page.pdf() produces raster-backed print output. Scroll with page JavaScript before a viewport capture when the user wants a lower section of the page.

Use raw CDP for Page.captureScreenshot, Page.startScreencast, and Page.printToPDF. A screencast client must acknowledge every Page.screencastFrame using Page.screencastFrameAck. Frames are driven by page activity; this is not fixed-frame-rate desktop capture.

PDF output supports paper dimensions, margins, landscape, scale, backgrounds, and page ranges. It does not currently provide selectable text, tagged PDF, outlines, headers/footers, or complete CSS paged-media behavior.

Drive MCP

Run obscura mcp for stdio or obscura mcp --http --port 3000 for HTTP. Navigate first, then inspect or interact with the current page. Refresh a snapshot or interactive-element listing after navigation, clicking, scrolling, or a framework rerender because element references may have changed.

Render-enabled MCP builds expose browser_screenshot as an MCP PNG image and browser_pdf as an embedded PDF resource. MCP does not stream screencast frames; choose CDP for that workflow.

Validate visual behavior

Start with a deterministic fixture that isolates the behavior. Then test a broad real-site set at both initial and scrolled positions. For an engine comparison, keep viewport, device scale, user agent, network inputs, settle policy, scroll, animation time, and capture boundary identical.

Confirm both engines navigated successfully and produced nonblank images before interpreting a diff. Treat a pixel metric as a regression tripwire, not a verdict. Inspect resource completion, box geometry, line wrapping, structural edges, clipping, and fixed or sticky behavior, then reduce real failures to a fixture. Do not introduce hostname-specific rendering logic.

Set expectations accurately

Obscura supports many common layout and paint paths but is not a bundled Chrome build. Long-tail CSS, service workers, some Web APIs, native media, GPU or compositor effects, PDF structure, and platform font rasterization can differ from Chromium. Preserve the project's existing positioning and published benchmark claims when editing its documentation. Use the benchmark suite and matched inputs when adding or updating performance or fidelity measurements.