Obscura
Rust headless browser with built-in anti-fingerprinting and CDP server. Fills the gap between Lightpanda (CDP, no stealth) and Scrapling (stealth, no CDP). Binary at ~/tools/obscura/obscura.
When to Use
| Scenario | Tool |
|---|---|
| Clean single-page markdown | Firecrawl |
| Cloudflare Turnstile bypass | Scrapling |
| Lightpanda / Scrapling | |
| Twitter/X | Jina |
Interactive @ref automation |
agent-browser |
| Stealth CDP automation | Obscura |
| Batch stealth scraping | Obscura |
| Low-RAM headless (30MB) | Obscura |
Usage
Fetch a page with stealth:
obscura fetch --stealth --quiet https://example.com --eval "document.title"
Parallel batch scrape:
obscura scrape URL1 URL2 URL3 --concurrency 25 --format json
Start CDP server (port 9224 to avoid Chrome conflict on 9222):
obscura serve --port 9224 --stealth
Chain through Proxelar for defense-in-depth — --proxy is a global flag, goes before the subcommand:
obscura --proxy http://127.0.0.1:8080 serve --port 9224 --stealth
obscura --proxy http://127.0.0.1:8080 fetch --stealth https://example.com
Connect Puppeteer: browserWSEndpoint: "ws://127.0.0.1:9224/devtools/browser"
Connect Playwright: endpointURL: "ws://127.0.0.1:9224"
CDP domain coverage: see references/cdp-coverage.md. Includes non-standard LP.getMarkdown for DOM-to-Markdown.
Gotchas
- Port 9224 is convention, not default. The binary defaults to 9222 (Chrome's port). Always pass
--port 9224. --stealthis off by default. Pass it explicitly for anti-fingerprinting and tracker blocking.--proxyis a global flag. Place it beforefetch/serve/scrape, not after.--quietsuppresses the banner. Use it when piping output.- WebSocket path differs from Lightpanda. Obscura:
/devtools/browser. Lightpanda: bare endpoint. - Ad-hoc signed binary, no notarization. SHA-256 recorded at
~/tools/obscura/obscura.sha256. Verify on update.
Helper Scripts
| Script | Purpose |
|---|---|
scripts/obscura_serve.sh |
Start CDP server on 9224 with cleanup trap, PID file, optional --with-proxelar |