browserlane

Browser automation for humans and AI agents, via CLI and MCP, built on WebDriver BiDi in Rust.

bl is a single-binary browser-automation tool with two surfaces:

• A CLI for humans and scripts (navigate, click, screenshot, find, ...)
• An MCP server for AI agents (85 tools over stdio JSON-RPC)

It drives Chrome via the WebDriver BiDi protocol, auto-installs the browser
on first use, and ships as one static binary on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Why browserlane

Driving a browser from code isn't new — Playwright,
Selenium, Cypress, and WebdriverIO have done it for years. And AI agents now have
their own browser tools: Playwright MCP, browser-use, Stagehand, and more.

The difference is in how they drive the browser. The agent-facing tools almost
all sit on the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) — Chrome's vendor-specific
side-channel, the same plumbing Playwright and Puppeteer use underneath. The
tools that speak the newer, W3C-standard
WebDriver BiDi protocol — Selenium,
WebdriverIO — are built for human test automation and ship as libraries on a Node
or JVM runtime.

browserlane sits in that gap: an agent-native tool — a human CLI and an MCP
server — that drives Chrome exclusively over WebDriver BiDi, as a single
Rust binary with no runtime to install. BiDi is the bidirectional, W3C-standard
protocol the browser vendors are converging toward, so browserlane is built on
the standard rather than a vendor-specific side-channel.

Install

One-line install (recommended)

macOS / Linux

curl -fsSL https://browserlane.com/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://browserlane.com/install.ps1 | iex

The installer detects your platform, verifies the download's checksum, installs
bl, and puts it on your PATH. Re-run any time to update.

Manual download

Or grab an archive from the
latest release,
extract it, and put bl on your PATH:

Build from source

Requires Rust stable.

git clone https://github.com/browserlane/browserlane
cd browserlane
cargo build --release
./target/release/bl --version

The first bl install (or any browser command) downloads Chrome-for-Testing into
the platform cache dir.

Quickstart — CLI

bl install                              # download Chrome for Testing
bl go https://example.com               # open a URL
bl screenshot -o page.png               # capture
bl find role button                     # locate "Submit" buttons by ARIA role
bl click "button[type=submit]"          # interact
bl eval "document.title"                # run JS
bl expect title contains "Example"      # assert page state (exit 0/1)
bl --help                               # all commands

The browser is visible by default. Pass --headless to hide it.

Quickstart — MCP (AI agents)

bl mcp is an MCP server (JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio). Wire it into your agent with
one command — bl registers itself by absolute path, so it works regardless
of PATH:

bl add-mcp claude          # Claude Code
bl add-mcp claude-desktop  # Claude Desktop
bl add-mcp cursor          # Cursor
bl add-mcp vscode          # VS Code (.vscode/mcp.json)
bl add-mcp codex           # OpenAI Codex CLI

bl add-mcp --list shows every client; add --stdout to print the config
instead of writing it. Run bl install once first so the agent's first
browser action doesn't stall on the Chrome download.

Then ask your agent things like "open example.com, click the second link,
screenshot the result". The 85 tools cover navigation, interaction, capture,
recording, emulation, network interception, the page clock, and more — see
bl mcp → tools/list for the full catalog.

Daemon

bl daemon start keeps Chrome warm across CLI invocations (sub-second startup
instead of relaunching per command). bl daemon status / bl daemon stop.

Platforms

CI builds + smoke-tests on every push:

The daemon IPC uses a Unix-domain socket on macOS/Linux and a named pipe on
Windows (\\.\pipe\browserlane).

Architecture

src/            ← the core engine (BiDi transport, browser, API, CLI, MCP server)
src/ext/        ← browserlane-specific commands + MCP tools, behind a stable seam
scripts/        ← cli-smoke.sh (the CLI test harness)

Custom commands and MCP tools live in src/ext/ behind a four-hook seam, so
they're cleanly separated from the core. See AGENTS.md and
CONTRIBUTING.md for the layout and how to add features.

Status

v0.1.2 — 65 CLI commands, 85 MCP tools, a persistent
daemon, and a self-checking CLI test harness (scripts/cli-smoke.sh). Signed,
notarized prebuilt binaries ship for macOS, Linux, and Windows (via the one-line
installer above); a crates.io release is on the roadmap.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.