Lightpanda Scraper

Fast headless browser web scraping using Lightpanda (0.5s page loads, 90x faster than Chromium). Perfect for OSINT recon, link extraction, and content scraping. No GPU or heavy dependencies needed.

Lightpanda Scraper — Fast Headless Browser for OSINT

Blazing fast web scraping using Lightpanda, a Zig-based headless browser. 0.5s per page vs 45s for Chromium/Playwright. Perfect for OSINT recon, link extraction, and content scraping.

Prerequisites

Install Lightpanda binary:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
curl -L https://github.com/nicholasgasior/lightpanda-browser/releases/latest/download/lightpanda-linux-x86_64 -o ~/.local/bin/lightpanda
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/lightpanda

Quick Start

# Dump page as markdown
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py https://target.com

# Extract all links
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py https://target.com --links

# Get raw HTML
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py https://target.com --html

Options

• --links — Extract and categorize all links from the page
• --html — Dump raw HTML instead of markdown
• --frames — Include iframe content
• --js "code" — Evaluate JavaScript on the page
• --output FILE — Save output to file
• --wait MODE — Wait condition: networkidle (default), load, domcontentloaded
• --strip TYPES — Comma-separated resource types to strip: js, css, images
• --proxy URL — Use proxy (e.g., socks5://127.0.0.1:9050 for Tor)
• --timeout SECS — Request timeout (default: 30)
• --serve --port PORT — Start CDP server mode
• --mcp — Start as MCP server (stdio)

Use Cases

OSINT Recon

# Quick page dump for analysis
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py https://target.com > recon.md

# Extract all endpoints from a site
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py https://target.com --links | grep -i api

# Crawl with Tor
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py https://target.com --proxy socks5://127.0.0.1:9050

Bug Bounty Recon

# Fast subdomain content grab
for sub in api admin dev staging; do
  python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py https://$sub.target.com --links 2>/dev/null
done

Content Extraction

# Save clean markdown
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py https://article.com --output article.md

# JavaScript evaluation
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py https://app.com --js "document.querySelectorAll('a').length"

CDP Server Mode

# Start server for programmatic access
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/lp-scrape.py --serve --port 9222
# Then connect with any CDP client

Speed Comparison

Tool	Page Load	Memory	Binary Size
Lightpanda	~0.5s	~50MB	~100MB
Chromium/Playwright	~45s	~500MB	~300MB
curl/wget	~0.3s	~5MB	N/A

Lightpanda gives you Playwright-like page rendering at near-curl speeds. The catch: no complex JS interactions (use Playwright for those).

Notes

• Lightpanda is in active development; some complex SPAs may not render perfectly
• For authenticated sessions or complex JS interactions, use Playwright instead
• Binary is ~100MB Zig-compiled native code, runs on Linux x86_64
• Supports HTTP/SOCKS5 proxies for Tor or VPN routing