brow

A browser rendering CLI. Take screenshots of web pages and render Excalidraw files to images using headless Chrome.

brow does not bundle a browser. You install or provide one explicitly.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/corespeed-io/brow/main/install.sh | bash

Build from source

bun install
bun run build

Browser setup

Before rendering, you need a browser. Two options:

Option 1: Install a managed browser

brow browser install

Downloads Chrome for Testing to ~/.cache/brow. This becomes the default runtime browser.

Option 2: Bring your own

Point to any Chrome/Chromium executable:

brow --browser /usr/bin/google-chrome -m web -u https://example.com -o screenshot.png

Resolution order

At runtime, brow resolves the browser in this order:

1. --browser <path> (explicit override)
2. Managed browser (via brow browser install)
3. Fail with actionable error

Usage

brow -m <mode> -o <output> [options]

Web screenshots

brow -m web -u https://example.com -o screenshot.png

Flag	Default	Description
-u, --url	(required)	URL to screenshot
--width	1280	Viewport width in pixels
--height	800	Viewport height in pixels
--full-page	true	Capture the full scrollable page
-s, --scale	1	Device scale factor (2 = retina/2x output)

The output image resolution is width * scale by height * scale. For example, --width 1280 --height 800 --scale 2 produces a 2560x1600 image.

Excalidraw rendering

brow -m excalidraw -i drawing.excalidraw -o output.png

Flag	Default	Description
-i, --input	(required)	Path to .excalidraw file
-t, --theme	light	light or dark
-s, --scale	1	Scale multiplier (2 = 2x resolution)
--width		Explicit output width in pixels
--height		Explicit output height in pixels

By default the output matches the drawing's natural dimensions. Use --scale to multiply them (e.g. -s 3 on a 240x140 drawing produces 720x420), or --width/--height to set exact output dimensions.

Global options

Flag	Description
-m, --mode	Rendering mode: web, excalidraw (default: web)
-o, --output	Output file path (required)
--browser	Path to a browser executable
-h, --help	Show help

Commands

Command	Description
brow browser install	Download and cache a managed browser

Adding a renderer

Create a new file in renderers/ that exports a Renderer<TConfig> and register it in renderers/registry.ts. Your renderer receives a Puppeteer Page and is responsible for navigating, rendering, and writing the output file.