Skip to main content

REST APIs

Browserless provides a comprehensive suite of REST APIs that allow you to interact with browser functionality through simple HTTP requests. These APIs enable you to perform various browser operations without having to implement complex browser automation code.

Benefits of REST APIs​

  • Simplicity: Interact with browser functionality using simple HTTP requests
  • Language Agnostic: Use any programming language or tool that can make HTTP requests
  • Stateless Operations: No need to maintain browser sessions for simple operations
  • Scalability: Easily integrate browser functionality into your applications at scale
  • Low Overhead: Minimize resource usage for simple browser tasks

When to Use REST APIs​

REST APIs are ideal for:

  • Simple, one-off browser operations (screenshots, PDF generation, content extraction)
  • Integrations where maintaining a browser session is unnecessary
  • Applications written in languages without robust browser automation libraries
  • Serverless functions or microservices where simplicity is paramount
  • High-throughput scenarios where connection overhead should be minimized

For more complex automation scenarios, especially those involving bot detection bypass, consider using BrowserQL, which provides a more powerful and flexible approach.

Available REST APIs​

Browserless has production ready APIs for various browser operations. Each API accepts different parameters and options; their schemas are displayed in the Open API page.

Browser APIs​

The Browser APIs help you execute specific tasks for your use-case, and are available for both shared and enterprise users.

  • /content, to return HTML of dynamic content
  • /unblock, to return HTML, screenshots or cookies for protected sites
  • /download, return files Chrome has downloaded
  • /function, run HTTP requests without installing a library
  • /pdf, export a page as a PDF
  • /screenshot, capture a .png or .jpg
  • /scrape, return the structured JSON
  • /export, capture and save a webpage as a complete archive
  • /performance, run parallel Google Lighthouse tests
Bot Detection

For strict bot detectors where browsers and a proxy aren't enough to get past, we would recommend using BrowserQL.

Remember to check out all the APIs available from the Open API page