rebrowser-playwright

What it is and what it does

rebrowser-playwright is a fork of the official Playwright Python library that applies patches designed to help browser automation scripts evade bot-detection systems. It maintains API compatibility with the original Playwright, supporting automation of Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit across Linux, macOS, and Windows. The package is intended as a drop-in replacement, meaning you can swap it in without rewriting your code.

The core purpose is to modify browser behavior and headers to appear less like automated tools and more like genuine user activity. It depends on pyee for event handling and greenlet for concurrency support. The package is maintained separately from the official Playwright but tracks its major and minor versions, so version 1.52.0 corresponds to Playwright 1.52.x with additional anti-detection patches applied.

Use it for:

• Web scraping sites with bot-detection protections that block standard Playwright
• Automated testing of web applications that check for automation signatures
• Gathering data from sites that serve different content to detected bots
• Headless browser testing where stealth against detection systems is required
• Automation workflows where detection would trigger CAPTCHAs or IP blocks

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

A patched version of Playwright that automates Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit browsers while attempting to evade bot-detection systems through rebrowser patches.

Yes, if you need bot-detection evasion for legitimate automation tasks. The permissive license and drop-in API compatibility make adoption low-risk. However, the aging maintenance status (462 days since release) and small community (102 stars) mean you should verify that the patches still work against current detection systems before relying on it for production. No known security vulnerabilities.

Install

rebrowser-playwright on PyPI

pip install rebrowser-playwright

uv add rebrowser-playwright

poetry add rebrowser-playwright

Installing rebrowser-playwright

Before you install

Medium install friction due to platform-specific wheels and native browser binaries. Package is aging (462 days since last release) but repository remains active with recent commits; maintenance signal is mixed.

License in practice

Apache-2.0 permissive license allows commercial and private use with minimal restrictions, though you must retain license notices and provide a copy of the license.

Quickstart

pip install rebrowser-playwright

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.goto('http://example.com')
    browser.close()

Requires Python 3.9 or later; native browser binaries (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit) are downloaded on first use and consume significant disk space.

Verify before relying

• Specific bot-detection tests passed or detection evasion success rate compared to unpatched Playwright
• Performance overhead of rebrowser patches relative to standard Playwright
• Compatibility guarantees with upstream Playwright API changes beyond version matching

Package facts

Evidence: rebrowser_playwright-1.52.0-py3-none-macosx_10_13_x86_64.whl; rebrowser_playwright-1.52.0-py3-none-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl; rebrowser_playwright-1.52.0-py3-none-macosx_11_0_universal2.whl; rebrowser_playwright-1.52.0-py3-none-manylinux1_x86_64.whl; rebrowser_playwright-1.52.0-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.whl; rebrowser_playwright-1.52.0-py3-none-win32.whl; rebrowser_playwright-1.52.0-py3-none-win_amd64.whl; rebrowser_playwright-1.52.0-py3-none-win_arm64.whl

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Further reading