Beachpatrol: Browser's End-user Automation CLI Hub. Potentialize All Tasks Regarding Online Life.
Essential software should be fully automatable. Web browsers aren't. Let's change that.
Beachpatrol is a CLI tool to replace and automate your everyday web browser.
Run to launch a Chromium or Firefox browser which can be controlled externally through Playwright scripts. You can use it as your daily driver; it works like a regular browser.
Use also to launch a specific profile, or .
To automate it, create a custom Playwright script in the folder. Then, run . It will run your script by default on the currently focused tab, but you can use the Playwright API to move to an existing tab, open a new one, or use a headless tab instead.
If you don't want to go back and forth to the CLI to automate your browser, you can install the . Its UI allows you to select a command and call it with arguments. It will call itself through the browser extension's Native Messaging feature. Also, the UI will highlight commands which are meant to run on the current URL, will provide GUI elements for common situations (such as pagination and dropdowns), and will support hotkeys:
First and foremost, contains a customized Playwright script to launch your browser. It passes arguments which closely recreate the experience of using a non-automated browser. For example, it does not set a fixed viewport (which is, otherwise, a sensible default for Playwright's main use-case of automated testing.)
Beachpatrol also installs and loads the packages , and . This is needed to hide the fact that the browser is automated, which in turn is needed for basic features such as Google Sign-in.
Naturally, the above packages are tangentially related to a cat-and-mouse game between web-scrapers and web-masters. As such, they might stop working at any time. Beachpatrol guarantees to find new automation-hiding techniques if that happens. Beachpatrol also encourages users to respect every website's terms and conditions.
is currently one of the best tools for this task. However, it doesn't support Firefox. We use for Firefox, which might encounter some issues such as Cloudflare's false positives, and extra Google captchas.
After the browser is launched, it listens on a UNIX socket, , for messages by .
When we say that web browsers aren't automatable, we're thinking more along the lines of the depth of automation available with tools like Bash, Vim or Emacs (where virtually every interaction can be scripted and interwoven into custom workflows without much resistance.)
Yes, we acknowledge there are existing ways to automate browser tasks like autofill, mouse and keyboard macros, bookmarklets, extensions, and of course various tools like Playwright.
Beachpatrol aspires to bring a new spin to the state-of-the-art, re-imagining automation tools not as a one-time task, but integrated into your daily browser. Just as your favorite shell or extendable text editor.
In short, our aim is to take existing automation tools (currently designed for testing or scraping) and tweak them for everyday browsing, while also providing a UI which is both simple and power-user friendly.
True, but it offers several value-added features:
Initial browser launch benchmarks suggested us to prioritize Playwright.
While Python is a popular language for web automation, we decided for JavaScript to enable code sharing with the browser extension.
Similar functionality can indeed be achieved with Userscript managers, such as the Violentmonkey browser extension.
But, while Beachpatrol allows us to control the browser from both the OS and a browser extension, our priority is the OS. Also, there are limitations on how much you can interact with the OS from a browser extension. Therefore, something like Playwright was the natural choice.
Furthermore, while controlling the browser from an extension is possible, Manifest v3 removed the ability to execute third-party strings of code. Popular automation extensions like Greasemonkey and Tampermonkey could also be affected by Manifest v3. The alternative is to embed the code into the extension, but that would require re-bundling the extensions after every change. Other tricks do exist to make this approach work, and there is some hope for future Manifest v3 solutions, but this path is certainly tricky.
It is more likely that Selenium and related tools will continue to work in the foreseeable future given the business demand for traditional browser testing.
Bookmarklets are handy for executing scripts with a click, but they are limited to user-triggered actions and may not handle complex workflows, such as automation based on specific timing or interaction with operating system features.
Plus, there's a personal preference factor. For those who like to have finer control, keeping automation scripts within their file system feels cleaner and less bound to a particular browser ecosystem. However, we recognize that bookmarklets have their place and can be the preferred choice for many users.
You can use Chromium DevDool's Recorder tab to record actions and export them as Puppeteer scripts, which use the same API as Playwright. Or, you can use the Playwright .
Also, given Playwright's popularity, you can describe your task in natural language to an AI and ask for it as a Playwright script. With some practice, this should get you halfway to a working script.
We welcome contributions of all kinds. If you have a suggestion or fix, please feel free to open an issue or pull request.
