browser-automation

Claude Code plugin for browser automation — built on Microsoft's official @playwright/cli. No MCP server, no port to babysit; Claude drives the browser through plain shell calls.

Install

/plugin marketplace add generativereality/plugins
/plugin install browser-automation@generativereality

Then, the first time Claude needs the browser on this machine, the skill will guide it through:

npm install -g @playwright/cli@latest
playwright-cli install

And the first time it runs in a workspace, it will write .playwright/cli.config.json with sane defaults so the browser opens headed by default and output lands in .browser-automation/.

What it ships

• A /browser skill that documents the setup, the parallel-session pattern, and the auth-persistence flow.
• A pointer to the upstream playwright-cli SKILL.md (shipped inside the CLI) for the full command reference — read on demand, no duplication.

What changed in 0.2.0

This plugin previously registered a Playwright MCP server connected to a manually-launched Chrome on a debug port. That stack disconnected mid-flow, spawned per-tab at parallel scale, and forced restart-to-clear-cache loops. 0.2.0 drops the MCP entirely and uses playwright-cli instead.

What you get:

• No MCP disconnect — playwright-cli runs through Bash like any other shell tool.
• No per-tab browser spawn — named sessions (-s=name) share a single browser instance with isolated contexts.
• No restart-to-clear-cache when the skill is edited.
• ~4× lower token usage than the MCP version per run (snapshots written to disk; agent reads what it needs).
• CDP-attach is preserved: playwright-cli attach --cdp=chrome connects to your normal Chrome the same way the old plugin did.
• Existing persistent Chrome profile is preserved: pass --profile=/path/to/profile to open to reuse the same user-data-dir the old plugin built up.

Requirements

• Node.js v18+ (for the npm install -g step).
• A browser. Chrome on the system path is auto-detected; otherwise playwright-cli install-browser downloads a Playwright-managed one.
• macOS / Linux / Windows — anywhere Playwright runs.

Patterns the skill covers

• Workspace defaults via .playwright/cli.config.json (headed by default, outputDir: ".browser-automation").
• Browser-source preference: attach via CDP to a running Chrome on port 9223 → managed launch on an existing --profile=… → fresh in-memory profile.
• One named session per Claude Code tab (-s=tab1, or PLAYWRIGHT_CLI_SESSION=...) for safe parallel use.
• state-save / state-load to log in once and reuse cookies across runs (Cloudflare dashboard, Porkbun, GitHub web UI, etc.).
• detach vs close — detach is the right cleanup for attached external browsers; close is for managed ones.