| name | canary-automate |
| description | Drive a real browser for a one-off task with Canary — navigate, click, fill, scrape, screenshot — and return the result. Nothing is recorded. Use when the user asks to automate a browser task, scrape a page, fill a form, or check something on a site without needing a report. Trigger phrases — "go to X and get Y", "scrape this page", "automate this browser task", "log in and check", "take a screenshot of". |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"author":"usecanary","version":"0.4.4","category":"workflow","tags":["canary","browser-automation","scraping"]} |
Canary automate (one-off)
Run a script against a real browser and return the result — ephemeral, nothing recorded. Use the
canary-scripting skill for the API.
When to use
- A quick, one-shot browser task: navigate, extract, fill, screenshot.
- Scraping or checking a page where you don't need a trace / video / report.
- For a recorded, verifiable run with a report, use canary-session instead.
Examples
Example 1: scrape
User says: "get the top 10 Hacker News titles" or "scrape the headlines"
Write a script that opens the page and evaluates the data, run it, return the JSON it logs.
Example 2: check
User says: "is the pricing page up and what's the headline?" or "screenshot the homepage"
goto, read the element (or screenshot), report.
Workflow
- If the runtime isn't installed:
npx @usecanary/cli install (one-time; downloads Chromium).
- Write a short, focused script with the canary-scripting API (
browser.getPage, page.goto,
locator/evaluate, console.log the result), observing first on unknown pages (see Hard
rules).
- Run it:
npx @usecanary/browser run ./script.js (or pipe the script via stdin).
- If the result is empty or a selector missed, observe and retry: run a second short script that
logs
page.url(), page.title(), and (await page.snapshotForAI()).full (or a targeted
locator(...).count()), pick a better selector, re-run. Named pages persist between runs, so
state carries over.
- Report the script's stdout. On optional extractions, degrade gracefully (log a
WARN, don't
crash) — but don't paper over a miss you can fix by observing.
- Cleanup (optional): the run leaves a shared background daemon up for reuse. To shut it (and any
browser) down, run
npx @usecanary/browser stop (alias of canary stop / canary daemon stop).
Hard rules
- Unknown page? Snapshot first, then act: read
(await page.snapshotForAI()).full to see what
is there, pick a semantic selector from it (getByRole, getByText), then interact. Never
guess selectors blind.
- Known page or selectors? Skip the snapshot and use direct selectors — faster and more reliable.
