CLI proxy for running Playwright commands on a shared remote browser. Run a server on a machine with a browser, then send commands from any client.

Built on top of playwright-multi-tab — a patched Playwright fork with multi-tab and multi-session browser automation.

• Session isolation — clients are automatically namespaced by git repo or hostname
• File transfer — screenshots and PDFs are automatically downloaded to the client
• Hot-reload config — .env.local changes are picked up without restart
• Security — bearer auth, path traversal protection, env allowlisting for child processes

• Bun ≥ 1.0

The patched multi-tab playwright CLI that drives Chrome (with multi-tab, multi-session, and per-profile PLAYWRIGHT_MCP_PROFILE_DIRECTORY support) is bundled inside the package — no separate install, no playwright browser-binary download. bun i -g rechrome is enough for rechrome setup to work out of the box.

Advanced: override the bundled CLI with PLAYWRIGHT_CLI=<cmd> in your .env.local (e.g. to point at a local checkout of the playwright-cli fork).

# From npm
bunx rechrome --help

# Or clone and link globally
git clone https://github.com/snomiao/rechrome.git
cd rechrome
bun install
bun link

Now rechrome (or rech) is available globally.

rech setup configures the daemon, Chrome extension, and connection URL in one pass:

rech setup                          # interactive: pick a profile, follow the prompts
rech setup --profile you@email.com  # non-interactive profile selection

What it does per Chrome profile:

1. Daemon — installs/starts the serve daemon (skipped if already healthy).

2. Extension — if the multi-tab extension isn't installed in the chosen profile, it opens an install guide in that exact profile; load it once via chrome://extensions → Load unpacked (a one-time manual click — Chrome only allows unpacked extensions through the GUI).

3. Token — once the extension is present, the auth token is read automatically from the profile's localStorage (no copy-paste). For headless/agent runs you can also pass it explicitly:

   rech setup --profile 18 --token <PLAYWRIGHT_MCP_EXTENSION_TOKEN>   # or RECH_TOKEN=… rech setup …

setup is agent-friendly: it never blocks on a TTY, opens the guide in the right profile, and auto-reads the token, so a non-interactive run completes end-to-end once the extension is loaded.

Managed QA profiles (experimental): rech provision-profile <name> --experimental spins up a fully isolated profile on Chrome for Testing (run npx playwright install chromium first) with the extension auto-loaded and the token auto-seeded — zero GUI, zero TTY. It is not your real Chrome (branded Google Chrome 149+ rejects --load-extension), so it has no logins/cookies; use it for clean QA fixtures, and rech setup for your real, logged-in Chrome.

On the machine with a browser:

rechrome serve

This auto-generates a connection URL in .env.local (with an auth key).

Copy the RECHROME_URL from the server's .env.local to the client's project .env.local:

# .env.local in your project directory
RECHROME_URL=http://YOUR_KEY@server-host:13775

# Open a URL
rech open https://example.com

# Take a screenshot
rech screenshot

# List open tabs
rech tab-list

# Any playwright-cli command works
rech --help

rechrome walks up from the current working directory to find .env.local, so each project can have its own connection URL, Chrome profile, and extension token.

Copy .env.example to .env.local and edit:

cp .env.example .env.local

Multi-profile tip: Each project's .env.local can specify a different Chrome profile via the ?profile= query param in RECHROME_URL. The server resolves display names and email addresses to the actual Chrome profile directory automatically (reads ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Local State).

# .env.local for a work project
RECHROME_URL="http://KEY@server:13775?token=TOKEN&extension_id=EXT_ID&profile=taku%40company.com"

Shell-set PLAYWRIGHT_MCP_* variables take priority over .env.local, so you can always override per-command without editing files.

By default the server binds to 127.0.0.1 (localhost only). For remote access, either:

• Use an SSH tunnel: ssh -L 13775:localhost:13775 server-host
• Or set RECH_HOST=0.0.0.0 (⚠️ ensure network is trusted — traffic is plain HTTP)

Each client gets an isolated browser session based on:

1. Git repo URL + branch (if in a git repo)
2. Hostname + working directory (fallback)

Clients can also pass -s=name to create named sub-sessions within their namespace.

bun install
bun test

rechrome depends on playwright-multi-tab, which is a fork of microsoft/playwright. We maintain it because the upstream does not yet support several features required for rechrome's use case:

We also fork playwright-mcp (inside playwright-multi-tab/lib/playwright-mcp) to support the custom extension ID and multi-tab session routing.

PRs upstream are welcome. Once these features land in the official packages we will drop the forks.

• playwright-multi-tab — the underlying Playwright fork powering rechrome's multi-tab and multi-session browser control
• microsoft/playwright — upstream

MIT