Deploy lightpanda

Deploy and Host Lightpanda on Railway

Lightpanda is a headless browser written from scratch in Zig for AI agents, scraping and automation. It runs JavaScript and exposes the Chrome DevTools Protocol, so Puppeteer, Playwright and chromedp connect to it like Chrome, while starting instantly and using a fraction of Chrome's memory.

About Hosting Lightpanda

This template runs two services. lightpanda runs the official lightpanda/browser:0.4.1 image as a CDP server on the private network only. gateway is a small Caddy proxy on the public domain that checks a generated token, sent as ?token= or a Bearer header, before passing WebSocket and HTTP traffic through; requests without it get 401. Connect Puppeteer or Playwright to LIGHTPANDA_WS_URL. Telemetry is off. The browser keeps no state between sessions, so there is no volume, and both services fit the Hobby plan. Lightpanda does not implement every web API yet, so test your target sites before relying on it.

Common Use Cases

• A fast headless browser for AI agents and MCP tools
• Scraping JavaScript-heavy pages at lower memory cost than Chrome
• Running Puppeteer or Playwright scripts against a remote browser

Dependencies for Lightpanda Hosting

• lightpanda/browser:0.4.1 (official image)
• caddy:2.11.4-alpine as the token gateway

Deployment Dependencies

• Lightpanda on GitHub
• Lightpanda 0.4.1 release
• Puppeteer connect()

Implementation Details

const browser = await puppeteer.connect({ browserWSEndpoint: process.env.LIGHTPANDA_WS_URL });
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://news.ycombinator.com/');

Notes:

• The gateway rewrites the Host header because Lightpanda only accepts local WebSocket hosts.
• Keep the service names; the gateway reaches the browser at lightpanda.railway.internal.

This is a community-maintained deployment package and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by Lightpanda.

Why Deploy Lightpanda on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Lightpanda on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.