Patchright is a patched, undetected version of the Playwright testing and automation framework, shipped as a driver and aimed at developers who need browser automation that anti-bot systems do not flag.

What it is

Patchright is a fork of the Playwright Testing and Automation Framework with patches applied to the browser itself. The repository serves the Patchright Driver — the patched engine — and is written in TypeScript under the Apache-2.0 licence. It is positioned as a drop-in replacement for Playwright, which means existing Playwright code is intended to run against it without being rewritten. The language bindings live outside this repository: a Python package, a NodeJS package, and a community-driven .Net package.

The concrete problem it solves is detection. Stock Playwright automates Chromium, but the traces it leaves behind let anti-bot and bot-management layers — Cloudflare among them, per the project's own topics — identify the session as automated and block it. Patchright patches Chromium-based browsers so those signals are not present, letting the same automation run against pages that would otherwise refuse it. The supported scope is narrow by design: only Chromium-based browsers are patched, and Firefox and WebKit are explicitly not supported.

Key capabilities

• Acts as a drop-in replacement for Playwright, so existing Playwright scripts are the intended starting point rather than a new API.
• Patches Chromium-based browsers for anti-detection; Firefox and WebKit are unsupported.
• Targets Cloudflare and similar bot detection, reflected in the cloudflare and cloudflare-bypass topics.
• Carries the antidetect topic, covering fingerprint and automation-signal suppression.
• Distributed as the Patchright Driver, with separate patchright-python, patchright-nodejs, and community patchright-dotnet bindings.
• Sits in the Chromium automation toolchain alongside chrome, chromium, and chromedriver.
• Published under Apache-2.0, with 4,619 stars, 227 forks, and 3 open issues.

Who uses it and how

• Web scraping and data extraction teams, which is the registry category the project is filed under.
• Automation and botting workflows that hit Cloudflare-protected pages and need the session to survive the check.
• Polyglot teams, since Python, NodeJS, and .Net bindings are each maintained separately from the driver.
• Proxy-backed scraping operations: the README is sponsored by proxy providers offering residential, ISP, and mobile IPs, which indicates the typical pairing of patched browsing with rotating proxies.
• Teams migrating from Playwright, who keep their existing scripts and change the driver underneath.

Getting started

Pick the binding for the language in use — the Python package, the NodeJS package, or the community .Net package — and use it as a drop-in replacement for Playwright; the driver repository itself is not the entry point. Documentation is hosted at playwright.dev.

How it compares

Playwright is the direct point of comparison, and Patchright keeps the same API and documentation while swapping in a patched Chromium driver. The trade is coverage for stealth: Patchright supports Chromium only, whereas Playwright also drives Firefox and WebKit.

When to use it — and when not to

Choose Patchright when the goal is Chromium automation that survives bot detection, and accept the upkeep of a patched driver that must track upstream Chromium changes. Do not choose it for cross-browser testing, for Firefox or WebKit targets, or for plain functional test suites where stock Playwright is sufficient. Note that the README excerpt is largely sponsor and proxy-provider material, so the substantive technical documentation lives in the companion language packages rather than in this repository.

curl -X POST "https://publisher.scrappey.com/api/v1?key=YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"cmd": "request.get", "url": "https://example.com"}'