Lightpanda

 

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	~16x less
Execution time (100 pages)	5s	46s	~9x faster

Quick start

Install

Package Managers

Latest nightly from Homebrew:

brew install lightpanda-io/browser/lightpanda

Latest nightly from Arch Linux User Repository:

yay -S lightpanda-nightly-bin

Download from the nightly builds

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

If you use Nix, you can run Lightpanda directly from the flake without downloading a binary:

nix run github:lightpanda-io/browser -- --help

Or pin it as an input in your own flake:

{
  inputs.lightpanda.url = "github:lightpanda-io/browser";
}

Note: The Linux release binaries are linked against glibc. On musl-based Linux distributions (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: the current release binaries need glibc 2.35 (x86_64) or 2.38 (arm64), so debian:bookworm-slim (2.36) is fine on x86_64 but too old for arm64 — use FROM ubuntu:24.04, FROM debian:trixie-slim, or FROM debian:forky-slim there — or build from sources.

Android / Termux: there is no native Android build. The Linux aarch64 binary needs the glibc loader (/lib/ld-linux-aarch64.so.1), which Android's Bionic libc does not provide, so it fails with the same cannot execute: required file not found error.

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:latest

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, or --dump png > page.png or --dump pdf > page.pdf for a text-only rendering of the page. --dump structured_data prints the page's JSON-LD, OpenGraph, Twitter card, meta and link tags as JSON, like the MCP structuredData tool. --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

To listen on a Unix-domain socket (owner-only, mode 0600) instead of TCP:

./lightpanda serve --unix-socket /run/user/1000/lightpanda.sock

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

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 frame = await context.newPage();

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

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

console.log(links);

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

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