unix-chrome-cli

Connect to the chrome dev socket running via unix domain socket.

Motivation

I don't like having privileged services run on localhost. In theory, you could run everything in docker / network jails but it is a pain. Unix domain sockets are a nice alternative to TCP ip sockets with limited access.

Using netns-jail (by me) you can route traffic that would go through TCP ip on localhost through a unix domain socket. Once you have done this, this tool lets you connect to chrome's development socket through unix domain sockets.

Alternatives

You don't need to use this at all. You could just let things run on localhost and connect to this. Ther are then a variety of tools you can use. You can use playwright. You can use selenium.

You could make a similar netns style wrapper with socat running in it to redirect TCP connections to unix domain socket.

Installation

pipx install unix-chrome-cli

Usage

Start chrome in a jail with a unix domain socket port.

netns-jail --nat --dns --forward /tmp/chrome.sock:localhost:9222 -- google-chrome --user-data-dir=/tmp/cj --remote-debugging-port=9222

Connect uchrome set-socket /tmp/chrome.sock

You can then run various commands.

• uchrome go url
• uchrome back
• uchrome dom

LLM use

You can then use this with something like claude code.