Use as a Rust library

The obscura crate embeds the engine in a Rust program with a Browser / Page / Element API plus a cookie store, no CDP round-trips. It builds V8 from source, so it is a git dependency rather than a crates.io release.

Add the dependency

[dependencies]
obscura = { git = "https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura" }
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["rt", "macros"] }
anyhow = "1"

The first build compiles V8 from source, so it is slow and needs the same build tools as Build from source. Pin a tag for reproducible builds:

obscura = { git = "https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura", tag = "v0.1.7" }

Quickstart

use obscura::Browser;
use std::time::Duration;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    let browser = Browser::builder()
        .stealth(true)
        .build()?;

    let mut page = browser.new_page().await?;
    page.goto("https://example.com").await?;

    println!("URL: {}", page.url());
    println!("HTML bytes: {}", page.content().len());

    let el = page.wait_for_selector("h1", Duration::from_secs(5)).await?;
    println!("Heading: {}", el.text());

    let title = page.evaluate("document.title");
    println!("Title: {}", title);

    Ok(())
}

API surface

Browser::builder() configures the engine: .stealth(bool), .proxy(url), .user_agent(ua), .storage_dir(dir), then .build(). Browser::new() uses defaults.

Page:

• goto(url).await navigate and wait for load
• content() rendered HTML
• url() current URL
• evaluate(js) run JavaScript, returns a serde_json::Value
• query_selector(css) first match as an Element, or None
• wait_for_selector(css, Duration).await poll until present
• settle(max_ms).await drive the event loop so async work (fetch, timers) completes

Element: text(), attribute(name), click().

CookieStore: set, get_all, get_for_url, save_to_file, load_from_file.

When to use which interface

• Embedding the engine in a Rust service: this crate.
• Driving from Node/Python with existing Puppeteer/Playwright code: the CDP server.
• Giving an AI agent browser tools: the MCP server.
• One-off fetches and scraping from the shell: the CLI.