playwright-archive-mcp

MCP server that drives a headless or interactive Playwright browser and records every HTTP request/response into the shared web-archive store (entry type request), making captured traffic searchable via unified-history-mcp.

Part of the Palimpsest investigative toolkit. The archive write-path and SSRF URL validation come from the shared web-archive-store.

Tools

Tool	Description
playwright_record(urls, wait, timeout, ...)	Batch: drive a headless browser against URL(s), record all HTTP traffic
playwright_start	Start a persistent interactive session with always-on recording
playwright_navigate / playwright_click / playwright_fill	Drive the interactive session
playwright_text / playwright_html / playwright_screenshot	Read page content / save a screenshot
playwright_back / playwright_forward / playwright_stats / playwright_close	Session control

Auth headers are redacted by default; binary/streaming bodies are skipped. Recorded entries become searchable once the web-archive rebuild tool runs.

Install

playwright-archive-mcp depends on web-archive-store — install it first:

git clone https://github.com/palimpsest-labs/web-archive-store
cd web-archive-store
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

cd ..
git clone https://github.com/palimpsest-labs/playwright-archive-mcp
cd playwright-archive-mcp
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
playwright install chromium   # downloads the browser binary

Once web-archive-store is published to PyPI this becomes a single pip install -e ..

CLI

A standalone recorder CLI is available both as a console script and a direct-run script (the latter works from a fresh clone if the sibling web-archive-store checkout is present):

playwright-archive https://example.com https://example.org
# or
python playwright_archive.py https://example.com

Tests

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

The suite is browser-free (pure logic + validation paths), so it runs without playwright install chromium.