Deploy and Host Obscura Headless Browser on Railway

About Hosting Obscura

Deploy Obscura v0.2.6 with an authenticated Chrome DevTools Protocol endpoint for Puppeteer and Playwright. The image uses the official non-stealth release, runs as a non-root user, and downloads a checksum-verified release binary at build time.

Why Deploy Obscura on Railway

Run an authenticated browser next to your workers over Railway private networking. Each deployment uses a pinned browser release and a readiness check.

Common Use Cases

Extract text and tables from JavaScript-rendered public pages.
Verify that a public page renders expected content in an automated check.

Dependencies for Obscura

Deployment Dependencies

The template creates one service. A client in the same Railway environment can connect using Puppeteer or Playwright.

Set the required OBSCURA_CDP_TOKEN to a unique random secret when deploying. Generate one with openssl rand -hex 32.

Connect on Railway

Use the private hostname from a service in the same Railway environment. Set OBSCURA_HOST to the browser service's private hostname and pass that service's OBSCURA_CDP_TOKEN to the client as a secret. Set OBSCURA_PORT to the browser port shown in its startup log. You can set PORT=9222 on the browser service to choose a fixed port.

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

const browser = await puppeteer.connect({
  browserWSEndpoint: `ws://${process.env.OBSCURA_HOST}:${process.env.OBSCURA_PORT}/devtools/browser`,
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.OBSCURA_CDP_TOKEN}` },
});

try {
  console.log(await browser.version());
} finally {
  await browser.disconnect();
}

Railway checks GET /healthz. Browser discovery and WebSocket connections require the token. Keep the service on private networking and store the token as a service variable.

Obscura documentation · Upstream release