✨ Highlights
Steel.dev is an open-source browser API that makes it easy to build AI apps and agents that interact with the web. Instead of building automation infrastructure from scratch, you can focus on your AI application while Steel handles the complexity.
Under the hood, it manages sessions, pages, and browser processes, allowing you to perform complex browsing tasks programmatically without any of the headaches:
- Full Browser Control: Uses Puppeteer and CDP for complete control over Chrome instances -- allowing you to connect using Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium.
- Session Management: Maintains browser state, cookies, and local storage across requests
- Proxy Support: Built-in proxy chain management for IP rotation
- Extension Support: Load custom Chrome extensions for enhanced functionality
- Debugging Tools: Built-in request logging, plus a UI to watch sessions live and replay them
- Anti-Detection: Includes stealth plugins and fingerprint management
- Resource Management: Automatic cleanup and browser lifecycle management
- Browser Tools: Exposes APIs to quick convert pages to markdown, readability, screenshots, or PDFs.
For detailed API documentation and examples, check out our API reference or explore the Swagger UI directly at http://0.0.0.0:3000/documentation.
Steel is in public beta and evolving every day. Your suggestions, ideas, and reported bugs help us immensely. Do not hesitate to join in the conversation on Discord or raise a GitHub issue. We read everything, respond to most, and love you.
If you love open-source, AI, and dev tools, we're hiring across the stack!
Make sure to give us a star ⭐
🛠️ Getting Started
The easiest way to get started with Steel is by creating a Steel Cloud account. Otherwise, you can deploy this Steel browser instance to a cloud provider or run it locally.
⚡ Quick Deploy
If you're looking to deploy to a cloud provider, we've got you covered.
| Deployment methods | Link |
|---|
| Pre-built Docker Image (combined API + UI) | |
| 1-click deploy to Railway | |
| 1-click deploy to Render | |
💻 Running Locally
Docker
The simplest way to deploy/run a Steel browser instance locally is to run the pre-built Docker image:
# Pull and run the Docker image
docker run -p 3000:3000 -p 9223:9223 ghcr.io/steel-dev/steel-browser
[!WARNING]
Ports 3000 and 9223 have no authentication. Don't expose them to the public internet or other untrusted networks. See SECURITY.md.
This will start the Steel browser server on port 3000 (http://localhost:3000) and the UI at http://localhost:3000/ui. The 9223 port is used for the console debugger.
You can now create sessions, scrape pages, take screenshots, and more. Jump to the Usage section for some quick examples on how you can do that.
Alternatively, you can run the API and UI separately with docker compose:
docker compose up
For Mac Silicon users, you will need to pass this env flag to the Docker compose command to run the images on the correct platform:
DOCKER_DEFAULT_PLATFORM=linux/arm64 docker compose up
Quickstart for Contributors
When developing locally, you will need to run the docker-compose.dev.yml file instead of the default docker-compose.yml file so that your local changes are reflected. Doing this will build the Docker images from the api and ui directories and run the server and UI on port 3000 and 5173 respectively.
docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up
You will also need to run it with --build to ensure the Docker images are re-built every time you make changes:
docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --build
If you run on a custom host, copy .env.example to .env and set DOMAIN and CDP_DOMAIN to your host. Docker Compose reads the .env file automatically.
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