Auto Browser

Give your AI agent a real browser, with a human in the loop.

Auto Browser is an MCP-native browser control plane for authorized workflows. It gives MCP clients, LLM agents, and operators a shared Playwright browser with human takeover, reusable auth profiles, approvals, audit trails, and local-first deployment.

Works with:

• Claude Desktop
• Cursor
• any MCP client that can talk HTTP or stdio
• direct REST callers when you want curl-first control

Why Auto Browser

• MCP-native from day one. The browser surface is already packaged as an MCP server instead of bolted on after the fact.
• Human takeover when the web gets brittle. noVNC keeps the same live session available when a person needs to step in.
• Login once, reuse later. Save named auth profiles and reopen fresh sessions that are already signed in.
• Local-first by default. Run the full stack on your own box with Docker Compose, or use Codespaces for a quick hosted demo.
• Safety rails built in. Approvals, operator identity, PII scrubbing, Witness receipts, and policy presets are all part of the product surface.
• Evidence you can hand to someone else. Witness receipt chains are Ed25519-signed, and an exported bundle verifies with scripts/verify_witness_bundle.py — which imports nothing from this project, so a recipient need not run or trust this controller to check it.
• We audit ourselves in public. docs/audits/2026-08-execution-audit.md documents an adversarial audit of this repo that found safety controls which reported success while doing nothing, with reproductions, the fixes, and the gates that close the class.
• Governed skill induction. Verified browser traces can become staged skill candidates with provenance that is signed when a mesh identity is configured — and checked on read, not just produced — plus verifier adapters and review-only graduation — agents that prove they can repeat themselves correctly, not just act once.

Release Highlights (v1.5.0)

• Read a page without paying for pixels. The new text observation preset returns the accessibility outline, extracted text, and interactables with no screenshot and no OCR — the cheapest way for an agent to read a page. Set PERCEPTION_PRESET_DEFAULT=text to make it a deployment-wide default.
• Find a string on the page in one call. browser.find_elements now takes a query (plain text or regex, case-insensitive) instead of a CSS selector and returns each match with surrounding context — no full observe needed to check one value.
• Errors agents can act on. Invalid tool arguments report field-level details, handler messages pass through instead of a generic failure, and the MCP bridge's cold-start error now says exactly how to start the controller.
• Any OpenAI-compatible model can drive the browser. A single generic adapter serves every model reachable over an OpenAI /chat/completions endpoint. New providers: openrouter (one key → ~every frontier model), xai (Grok), deepseek, minimax, and openai_compatible (custom base URL for self-hosted Ollama / vLLM / LM Studio, Azure, Together, Groq, Fireworks, …). Vision + function-calling with a content-parse fallback for endpoints that ignore tool_choice.
• browser://audit/events MCP resource. List and read recent audit events across sessions directly over MCP.
• Playwright pin parity enforced in CI. The controller (pip) and browser-node (npm) Playwright versions must match exactly — a single-side bump can no longer merge and crash-loop compose deployments.
• On PyPI. pip install auto-browser-client for the SDK, pip install auto-browser-langchain for the LangChain/LangGraph/CrewAI adapters, and uvx auto-browser-mcp to run the MCP stdio bridge with zero setup. Releases publish via PyPI trusted publishing (OIDC) on tag push.

Since v1.3.0

• browser_manager.py is now a pure facade + composition root (1,284 → 769 lines), with domain logic extracted into app/browser/services/.
• Fork state exports are encrypted at rest and shadow-browse state never touches disk.
• Download capture tasks can no longer be garbage-collected mid-flight, shadow-browse failures roll back cleanly, and page listeners survive object-id reuse.
• Release gates in CI enforce dependency audits, fixture evals, client tests, Python wheel builds, and the 80% controller coverage gate on Python 3.11 and 3.14.

See CHANGELOG.md for the full release history.

Good Fits

• internal dashboards and admin tools
• operator-assisted QA and browser debugging
• login-once, reuse-later account workflows
• brittle sites where a human may need to recover the flow
• MCP-powered agent workflows that need a real browser, not just HTML fetches

Not the Goal

• CAPTCHA solving
• unauthorized scraping or account automation
• deceptive identity shaping or bypass tooling

What You Get

Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/LvcidPsyche/auto-browser.git
cd auto-browser
docker compose up --build

That is enough for local development with the default settings.

Optional:

cp .env.example .env
make doctor

Run make doctor from a normal terminal with local Docker access and permission to open localhost sockets.

Open:

• API docs: http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs
• Operator dashboard: http://127.0.0.1:8000/dashboard
• Visual takeover: http://127.0.0.1:6080/vnc.html?autoconnect=true&resize=scale

All published ports bind to 127.0.0.1 by default.

Try It in Codespaces

Codespaces provisions the stack automatically. The dashboard and noVNC tabs are usually ready in about 90 seconds.

First Useful Demo

The highest-signal flow in this repo is:

1. create a session
2. log in manually if the site needs a human
3. save the session as a named auth profile
4. open a new session from that auth profile
5. continue work without reauthing

Start here:

• examples/login-and-save-profile.md
• examples/README.md

Minimal session creation:

curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8000/sessions \
  -X POST \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"name":"demo","start_url":"https://example.com"}' | jq

Minimal observation:

curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8000/sessions/<session-id>/observe | jq

MCP Clients

Auto Browser exposes:

• an HTTP MCP endpoint at http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp
• convenience endpoints at http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp/tools and http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp/tools/call
• a stdio bridge: uvx auto-browser-mcp from PyPI, or scripts/mcp_stdio_bridge.py in a repo checkout

The default MCP tool profile is curated, which keeps the browser surface compact for better tool selection. If you want the full internal tool surface, set:

MCP_TOOL_PROFILE=full

Raw tool-call example:

curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp/tools/call \
  -X POST \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "name":"browser.create_session",
    "arguments":{
      "name":"demo",
      "start_url":"https://example.com"
    }
  }' | jq

Client setup guides:

• docs/mcp-clients.md
• examples/claude-desktop-setup.md
• examples/cursor-mcp-setup.md
• examples/claude_desktop_config.json

For resource listing, resource reads, and subscription-style update examples, see docs/mcp-clients.md#resources-and-subscriptions.

Convergence Harness

Auto Browser ships a Stage 0 convergence harness for Agent Skill Induction. It runs a structured task contract, records tamper-checked traces, verifies completion, and writes a staged skill candidate carrying provenance. With a mesh identity configured that provenance is signed, and the registry verifies the signature before serving a candidate — a candidate that fails the check, or that was dropped into the staging directory unsigned, is refused. Candidates induced from a mock run are marked simulated so they cannot pass as converged. Generated skills are staged only — promotion stays explicit and reviewed.

Read-only inspection tools (harness.list_runs, harness.get_status, harness.get_trace) are exposed in the default curated MCP tool profile so agents can introspect harness state without elevated access. Convergence runs, drift checks, candidate management, and graduation require MCP_TOOL_PROFILE=full, or can be invoked directly over REST.

Start with docs/convergence-harness.md. A deterministic local smoke is:

python -m controller.harness.run --contract evals/contracts/example_read.json --mock-final-url https://example.com --mock-final-text "Example Domain"

For MCP clients, set MCP_TOOL_PROFILE=full to expose the harness.* tools.

Security and Compliance

For a real private deployment, set at least:

APP_ENV=production
API_BIND_SCOPE=exposed
API_BEARER_TOKEN=<strong-random-secret>
REQUIRE_OPERATOR_ID=true
AUTH_STATE_ENCRYPTION_KEY=<44-char-fernet-key>
REQUIRE_AUTH_STATE_ENCRYPTION=true
REQUEST_RATE_LIMIT_ENABLED=true
METRICS_ENABLED=true
STEALTH_ENABLED=false

COMPLIANCE_TEMPLATE can apply a preconfigured posture at startup:

Both presets require upload approvals and enable Witness receipts. Startup writes the applied policy to /data/compliance-manifest.json. The legacy names (HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR, PCI-DSS) still work as deprecated aliases and emit a warning at startup.

Example:

COMPLIANCE_TEMPLATE=strict docker compose up

For deployment details, hosted Witness notes, CLI auth modes, and reverse-SSH guidance, see:

• docs/deployment.md
• docs/production-hardening.md

Architecture at a Glance

flowchart LR
    User[Human operator] -->|watch / takeover| noVNC[noVNC]
    LLM[Any model: OpenAI / Claude / Gemini / OpenRouter / Grok / DeepSeek / MiniMax / local] -->|shared tools| Controller[Controller API]
    Controller -->|Playwright protocol| Browser[Browser node]
    noVNC --> Browser
    Browser --> Artifacts[(screenshots / traces / auth state)]
    Controller --> Artifacts
    Controller --> Policy[Allowlist + approval gates]

Model providers

First-class adapters for OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini (API or CLI). Beyond those, a single generic OpenAI-compatible adapter drives any model reachable over an OpenAI /chat/completions endpoint — set an API key to enable it:

Vision (screenshots) is used for every provider except text-only ones. See .env.example for the *_API_KEY / *_BASE_URL / *_MODEL settings.

Core components:

• browser-node/ runs Chromium, Xvfb, x11vnc, and noVNC
• controller/ exposes the FastAPI controller, MCP transport, policy rails, and orchestration endpoints
• data/ holds runtime artifacts, auth state, approvals, audit logs, and optional CLI caches
• scripts/ contains local helpers for doctor, smoke tests, bridges, and release checks

Repo Guide

Common Commands

Documentation Map

Contributing

If you want to help, start with:

• CONTRIBUTING.md
• docs/good-first-issues.md
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

If Auto Browser is useful, a star helps other people find it. Sponsorship and tip options live in TIPS.md.