lexmount/moli

What it is

Moli is a standalone headless browser kernel written in Rust, not a Chromium wrapper. It runs V8 JavaScript, a native DOM, CSS and networking, and builds layout and pixels only when an operation needs them. It can fetch and extract pages, search the web, and automate browser tasks through a CLI, CDP, WebDriver Classic, or WebDriver BiDi. It supports Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Who it's for

• Developers building AI agents that need to fetch, extract, or automate web pages
• Teams running crawling, retrieval pipelines, browser-use agents, evaluation environments, or reinforcement-learning workloads
• Users of Playwright, Puppeteer, or Selenium who want a lightweight browser endpoint

Requirements

Setup

1. Install on Linux or macOS

   Run the installer script from the latest release.

   bashCopy

   curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsSL \
     https://github.com/lexmount/moli/releases/latest/download/moli-installer.sh | sh

2. Install on Windows

   Run the installer in PowerShell.

   powershellCopy

   powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://github.com/lexmount/moli/releases/latest/download/moli-installer.ps1 | iex"

3. Install via an AI agent

   Give your AI agent a prompt that installs the Moli skills and the prebuilt binary, then fetches a page.

   textCopy

   Install the skills under https://github.com/lexmount/moli/tree/main/skills,
   follow their instructions to download and install the latest prebuilt Moli
   binary, then use moli-webfetch to fetch https://example.com and show me the
   result.

Examples

moli fetch \
  --dump markdown \
  --wait-until done \
  https://example.com

moli fetch \
  --dump semantic_tree_text \
  --wait-selector body \
  https://example.com

moli fetch --layout --dump screenshot https://example.com > page.png
moli fetch --layout --dump screenshot_full https://example.com > full-page.png
moli fetch --layout --dump pdf https://example.com > page.pdf

# Basic automation server for DOM-first workloads
moli serve

# Enable real geometry, coordinate input, and screenshot/screencast surfaces
moli serve --layout

# Also fetch optional image, font, audio, video, media, and text-track resources
moli serve --layout --resource

import { chromium } from "playwright";

const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP("http://127.0.0.1:9222");
const context = browser.contexts()[0];
const page = context.pages()[0] ?? await context.newPage();

await page.goto("https://example.com");
console.log(await page.locator("body").innerText());

await browser.close();

Pros & cons

Images