obscura

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?

Obscura Cloud

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 →

Open Source Support

Sponsors

Obscura is supported by organizations helping us build independent open-source browser infrastructure.

Want to sponsor? Email hello@obscura.sh.

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

# NixOS
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.obscura

# 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 \
  -e OBSCURA_CDP_TOKEN="$(openssl rand -hex 32)" \
  h4ckf0r0day/obscura

Image on Docker Hub. Multi-stage build on distroless/cc:nonroot — no shell, no package manager, runs as uid 65532, ~57 MB compressed. A mounted --storage-dir must be writable by uid 65532. Publish to host loopback as above; -p 9222:9222 exposes the port on every interface.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura.git
cd obscura

# Rendering
cargo build --release -p obscura-cli --bins --features render

# Rendering and stealth
cargo build --release -p obscura-cli --bins --features render,stealth

# No rendering
cargo build --release -p obscura-cli --bins --no-default-features

# No rendering, with stealth
cargo build --release -p obscura-cli --bins --no-default-features --features stealth

Requires Rust 1.75+ (rustup.rs). First build takes ~5 min (V8 compiles from source, cached after). The stealth build also compiles BoringSSL and generates bindings, so it needs CMake, Clang, and the libclang/LLVM development libraries. On Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake clang libclang-dev llvm-dev

The rendering build uses rustls. The rendering-and-stealth build uses wreq/BoringSSL and therefore needs the additional build tools above.

Quick Start

Fetch a page