Lightpanda

Overview

Lightpanda is a headless browser engine written in Zig, built from scratch for automation, crawling, and AI agents. It executes JavaScript without graphical rendering, offering a minimal memory footprint and high speed compared to traditional headless browsers like Chrome.

Key Features

• Built from scratch in Zig, not a Chromium fork.
• Headless operation with JavaScript execution, no rendering overhead.
• CDP and Webdriver Bidi support for Puppeteer and Playwright compatibility.
• Agent mode with PandaScript for LLM-driven browser automation.
• Native MCP server with session isolation.
• Benchmarked 9x faster and 16x less memory than headless Chrome.

Use Cases

• Web scraping and crawling at scale.
• AI agent navigation and task automation.
• Running Puppeteer/Playwright scripts with lower resource usage.
• Server-side page dumping to HTML, Markdown, PNG, or PDF.

Getting Started

• Install via curl script, Homebrew, Arch AUR, Docker, or nightly binaries. Then run ./lightpanda fetch --dump html <url> or start a CDP server with ./lightpanda serve.

Deployment & Requirements

• Linux and macOS binaries available; Windows via WSL2. Docker images for amd64 and arm64. Linux binaries require glibc; musl-based distros need a glibc base image.

Before You Adopt

• License: AGPL-3.0. Review its terms before using, modifying, or distributing the project.
• Linux binaries are linked against glibc and fail on musl-based distros like Alpine.
• Telemetry is enabled by default and can be disabled via environment variable.