---
title: "Deploy Camofox Browser | Open Source Browserless Alternative"
description: "Stealth Firefox browser API for AI agents, locked down by default"
category: "Automation"
url: https://railway.com/deploy/camofox-stealth-browser
---

# Deploy Camofox Browser | Open Source Browserless Alternative

Stealth Firefox browser API for AI agents, locked down by default

**[Deploy Camofox Browser | Open Source Browserless Alternative on Railway](https://railway.com/template/camofox-stealth-browser)**

Machine-readable deploy manifest (JSON, validated by TemplateCI): https://railway.com/deploy/camofox-stealth-browser/manifest.json

- **Creator:** katsuba.dev
- **Category:** Automation

## Template content

### Camofox https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/jo-inc/camofox-browser@v1.14.0/fox.png

- **Image:** ghcr.io/jo-inc/camofox-browser:1.14.0
- **Public domain:** Yes

## Documentation

# Deploy and Host Camofox Browser on Railway

Camofox Browser is a stealth headless browser served over HTTP: your agent or scraper drives a real Firefox through a small REST API instead of shipping Playwright, a browser binary and 400 MB of Chromium dependencies inside its own container. It is built on Camoufox, a Firefox fork whose anti-detection work happens in the C++ layer rather than in injected JavaScript, so the usual `navigator.webdriver` and WebGL tells are simply not there to find.

## About Hosting Camofox Browser

This template runs the project's own published image — `ghcr.io/jo-inc/camofox-browser:1.14.0`, pinned, with Camoufox 135.0.1 already baked in — as a single service with a volume. There is no database and nothing to build: the deploy is one container pull, and the browser is warm within about a minute.

Two decisions here are worth knowing about before you deploy, because they are the ones that differ from the obvious setup.

**The API is closed.** The server has three separate keys, and only one of them is the master gate: `CAMOFOX_ACCESS_KEY`. It is generated for you and required on every route except `/health`. This matters more than it sounds — the API includes `/tabs/{id}/evaluate`, which runs arbitrary JavaScript in a browser that sits inside your private Railway network. A deployment of this server without that key set is a public remote-code-execution surface with a side of SSRF, not merely an open scraper. `CAMOFOX_API_KEY` (cookie import) and `CAMOFOX_ADMIN_KEY` (`POST /stop`) are generated separately so you can hand one out without handing out everything.

**Everything durable is on the volume.** Browser profiles, imported cookies, upload staging and Playwright traces all live under `/data`. Upstream defaults them to `~/.camofox`, which on Railway is the ephemeral layer — the practical effect of leaving that alone is that a logged-in session you spent effort establishing quietly disappears on your next redeploy.

Crash telemetry is off. Upstream ships anonymized crash and hang reporting turned **on**, and it files those reports as public GitHub issues against `jo-inc/camofox-browser`. That is a reasonable default for a project collecting its own field data and a surprising one for someone who clicked Deploy, so this template sets `CAMOFOX_CRASH_REPORT_ENABLED=false`. Set it to `true` if you would like to help, or point `CAMOFOX_CRASH_REPORT_URL` at an endpoint of your own.

## Common Use Cases

- **Browser tool for an AI agent**: eleven MCP-shaped operations — create tab, navigate, snapshot, click, type, scroll, screenshot, evaluate — with accessibility snapshots that give the model element refs instead of raw HTML.
- **Scraping sites that fingerprint the browser**: real Firefox with a consistent fingerprint (spoofed WebGL renderer, plausible screen and hardware, no `webdriver` flag) rather than a patched Chromium that announces itself.
- **Logged-in automation**: import a Netscape cookie file once, and the per-user profile — cookies, localStorage, optionally IndexedDB — is checkpointed to the volume and restored on the next session, across redeploys.
- **Shared browser for a fleet of small workers**: session isolation is per `userId`, with per-user and global tab caps, so several jobs can share one deployment without seeing each other's state.
- **YouTube transcripts without a browser**: `yt-dlp` ships in the image and the bundled plugin uses it directly, which is far cheaper than driving a page.

## Dependencies for Camofox Browser Hosting

### Deployment Dependencies

- The upstream image, `ghcr.io/jo-inc/camofox-browser` — no build step, no fork.
- [Camoufox](https://github.com/daijro/camoufox) 135.0.1-beta.24, pre-baked into the image.
- A 1 GB volume at `/data`. Nothing else: no database, no queue, no cache.

### Implementation Details

- **Port.** The image bakes `CAMOFOX_PORT=9377` and the app prefers it over Railway's injected `PORT`, so `PORT` is pinned to 9377 to keep the platform routing to the port that is actually listening. Leave it alone.
- **No healthcheck.** `/health` returns 503 while the server is relaunching a browser that died — a state to recover from, not one to fail a deploy on. Verified across three consecutive deploys.
- **Memory.** Measured on this template: **172 MB** once the browser has shut down for idleness, 300–500 MB with it warm, and up to **930 MB** with several tabs open across concurrent sessions. Firefox is genuinely heavy, and upstream's own telemetry shows native memory growing by several hundred MB over long runs; the server watches for that itself and recycles the browser (`BROWSER_RSS_RESTART_THRESHOLD_MB`, default 1500). Budget roughly **$3–10/month** depending on how much you actually browse — an instance that sits idle most of the day lands near the bottom of that. `BROWSER_IDLE_TIMEOUT_MS` closes the browser after five minutes with no sessions and is the single biggest lever on the number; verified here, and `/health` keeps answering 200 while the browser is stopped, so nothing else notices.
- **Concurrency.** Defaults are 3 concurrent tabs per user, 10 tabs per session, 50 tabs and 50 sessions globally. Raise them alongside the memory budget, not before it.
- **Interactive mode is off.** The noVNC plugin can put a live view of the browser on a web page; on a public domain that is a second door, so it stays disabled.

### Verifying your deployment

```bash
URL=https://your-service.up.railway.app
KEY=

curl -s $URL/health                                  # public, no key needed
curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' $URL/tabs   # expect 401

TAB=$(curl -s -X POST $URL/tabs -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"userId":"me","sessionKey":"s1","url":"https://example.com"}')
echo "$TAB"
```

Then check the stealth is real, which is the whole point of the product:

```bash
curl -s -X POST $URL/tabs//evaluate -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"userId":"me","expression":"navigator.webdriver"}'
# -> {"ok":true,"result":false}
```

`GET /` (authenticated) returns the server's own status. The full route list is in the project's [OpenAPI spec](https://github.com/jo-inc/camofox-browser/blob/master/openapi.json).

## Why Deploy Camofox Browser on Railway?

A headless browser is the awkward part of a scraping or agent stack: too heavy to bundle into every worker, too stateful to run as a function, and too memory-hungry to ignore. Running it as its own Railway service gives it a private hostname your other services can call, a volume that keeps logged-in profiles across deploys, and per-second billing that actually rewards the idle shutdown built into the server. Because the image is upstream and pinned, upgrading is a one-line change you choose to make rather than something that happens to you on a redeploy.


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