🪄 Patches for undetectable browser automation

This repo contains patches to enhance popular web automation libraries. Specifically, it targets the puppeteer and playwright packages.

Some aspects of automation libraries or browser behavior cannot be adjusted through settings or command-line switches. Therefore, we fix these issues by patching the library's source code. While this approach is fragile and may break as the libraries' source code changes over time, the goal is to maintain this repo with community help to keep the patches up to date.

Do I really need any patches?

Out of the box Puppeteer and Playwright come with some significant leaks that are easy to detect. It doesn't matter how good your proxies, fingeprints, and behaviour scripts, if you don't have it patched, you're just a big red flag for any major website.

🕵️ You can easily test your automation setup for major modern detections with rebrowser-bot-detector (sources and details)

| Before the patches 👎 | After the patches 👍 | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | | |

Is there an easy drop-in replacement?

If you don't want to mess with the patches and all possible errors, there is a drop-in solution for you. These packages have simply applied rebrowser-patches on top of the original code, nothing more.

Puppeteer: rebrowser-puppeteer and rebrowser-puppeteer-core

Playwright: coming soon

Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Open package.json and replace puppeteer and puppeteer-core packages with rebrowser-puppeteer and rebrowser-puppeteer-core. Don't change versions of the packages, just replace the names.
2. Run npm install (or yarn install)
3. Find and replace in your scripts any mentions of puppeteer and puppeteer-core with rebrowser-puppeteer and rebrowser-puppeteer-core
4. 🚀 Go to the rebrowser-bot-detector page and test your patched browser.

Our goal is to maintain and support these drop-in replacement packages with the latest versions, but we mainly focus on fresh versions, so if you're still using puppeteer 13.3.7 from the early 90s, it might be a good time to upgrade. There's a high chance that it won't really break anything as the API is quite stable over time.

Available patches

Fix Runtime.Enable leak

Popular automation libraries rely on the CDP command Runtime.Enable, which allows receiving events from the Runtime. domain. This is crucial for managing execution contexts used to evaluate JavaScript on pages, a key feature for any automation process.

However, there's a technique that detects the usage of this command, revealing that the browser is controlled by automation software like Puppeteer or Playwright. This technique is used by all major anti-bot software such as Cloudflare, DataDome, and others.

We've prepared a full article about our investigation on this leak, which you can read in our blog.

For more details on this technique, read DataDome's blog post: How New Headless Chrome & the CDP Signal Are Impacting Bot Detection. In brief, it's a few lines of JavaScript on the page that are automatically called if Runtime.Enable was used.

Our fix disables the automatic Runtime.Enable command on every frame. Instead, we manually create contexts with unknown IDs when a frame is created. Then, when code needs to be executed, we have implemented two approaches to get the context ID. You can choose which one to use.

1. Create a new isolated context via Page.createIsolatedWorld and save its ID from the CDP response.

🟢 Pros: All your code will be executed in a separate isolated world, preventing page scripts from detecting your changes via MutationObserver and other techniques.

🔴 Cons: You won't be able to access main context variables and code. While this is necessary for some use cases, the isolated context generally works fine for most scenarios. Also, web workers don't allow creating new worlds, so you can't execute your code inside a worker. This is a niche use case but may matter in some situations.

2. Call Runtime.Enable and then immediately call Runtime.Disable.

This triggers Runtime.executionContextCreated events, allowing us to catch the proper context ID.

🟢 Pros: You will have full access to the main context.

🔴 Cons: There's a slight chance that during this short timeframe, the page will call code that leads to the leak. The risk is low, as detection code is usually called during specific actions like CAPTCHA pages or login/registration forms, typically right after the page loads. Your business logic is usually called a bit later.

🎉 Our tests show that both approaches are currently undetectable by Cloudflare or DataDome.

Note: you can change settings for this patch on the fly using an environment variable. This allows you to easily switch between patched and non-patched versions based on your business logic.

• REBROWSER_PATCHES_RUNTIME_FIX_MODE=alwaysIsolated — always run all scripts in isolated context (default)
• REBROWSER_PATCHES_RUNTIME_FIX_MODE=enableDisable — use Enable/Disable technique
• REBROWSER_PATCHES_RUNTIME_FIX_MODE=0 — completely disable this patch
• REBROWSER_PATCHES_DEBUG=1 — enable some debugging messages

Remember, you can set these variables in different ways, for example, in code:

process.env.REBROWSER_PATCHES_RUNTIME_FIX_MODE = "alwaysIsolated"

or in command line:

REBROWSER_PATCHES_RUNTIME_FIX_MODE=alwaysIsolated node app.js

Change sourceURL to generic script name

By default, Puppeteer adds //# sourceURL=pptr:... to every script in page.evaluate(). A remote website can detect this behavior and raise red flags. This patch changes it to //# sourceURL=app.js. You can also adjust it via environment variable:

# use any generic filename
REBROWSER_PATCHES_SOURCE_URL=jquery.min.js
# use 0 to completely disable this patch
REBROWSER_PATCHES_SOURCE_URL=0

Method to access browser CDP connection

Sometimes, it could be very useful to access a CDP session at a browser level. For example, when you want to implement some custom CDP command. There is a method page._client() that returns CDP session for the current page instance, but there is no such method for browser instance. This patch adds a new method _connection() to Browser class, so you can use it like this:

browser._connection().on('Rebrowser.addRunEvent', (params) => { ... })

Note: it's not detectable by external website scripts, it's just for your convenience.

Change default utility world name

The default utility world name is '__puppeteer_utility_world__' + packageVersion. Sometimes you might want to change it to something else. This patch changes it to util and allows you to customize it via env variable:

REBROWSER_PATCHES_UTILITY_WORLD_NAME=customUtilityWorld
# use 0 to completely disable this patch
REBROWSER_PATCHES_UTILITY_WORLD_NAME=0

This env variable cannot be changed on the fly, you have to set it before running your script because it's used at the moment when the module is getting imported.

| Before patch 👎 | After patch 👍 | |--------| --- | | | |

Note: it's not detectable by external website scripts, but Google might use this information in their proprietary Chrome; we never know.

Usage

This package is designed to be run against an installed library. Install the Puppeteer library, then call the patcher, and it's ready to go.

In the root folder of your project, run:

npx rebrowser-patches@latest patch

You can easily revert all changes with this command:

npx rebrowser-patches@latest unpatch

You can also patch a package by providing the full path to its folder, for example:

npx rebrowser-patches@latest patch --packagePath /web/app/node_modules/puppeteer-core-custom

You can see all command-line options by running npx rebrowser-patches@latest --help, but currently, there's just one patch for one library, so you don't need to configure anything.

⚠️ Be aware that after running npm install or yarn install in your project folder, it might override all the changes from the patches. You'll need to run the patcher again to keep the patches in place.

How to update the patches?

If you already have your package patched and want to update to the latest version of rebrowser-patches, the easiest way would be to delete node_modules/puppeteer-core, then run npm install or yarn install --check-files, and then run npx rebrowser-patches@latest patch.

Supported versions

| Pptr Ver | Release Date | Chrome Ver | Patch Support | |--------------------------------------|--------------|------------|---------------| | 23.3.x | 2024-09-04 | 128 | ✅ | | 23.2.x | 2024-08-29 | 128 | ✅ | | 23.1.x | 2024-08-14 | 127 | ✅ | | 23.0.x | 2024-08-07 | 127 | ✅ | | 22.15.x | 2024-07-31 | 127 | ✅ | | 22.14.x | 2024-07-25 | 127 | ✅ | | 22.13.x | 2024-07-11 | 126 | ✅ | | 22.12.xand below | 2024-06-21 | 126 | ❌ |

What about Playwright support?

Currently, this repo contains only patches for the latest Puppeteer version. Creating these patches is time-consuming as it requires digging into someone else's code and changing it in ways it wasn't designed for.

📣 If we see demand from the community for Playwright support, we'll be happy to allocate more resources to this mission. Please provide your feedback in the issues section.

Follow the project

We're currently developing more patches to improve web automation transparency, which will be released in this repo soon. Please support the project by clicking ⭐️ star or watch button.

💭 If you have any ideas, thoughts, or questions, feel free to reach out to our team by email or use the issues section.

The fix doesn't help, I'm still getting blocked 🤯

⚠️ It's important to know that this fix alone won't make your browser bulletproof and undetectable. You need to address many other aspects such as proxies, proper user-agent and fingerprints (canvas, WebGL), and more.

Always keep in mind: the less you manipulate browser internals via JS injections, the better. There are ways to detect that internal objects such as console, navigator, and others were affected by Proxy objects or Object.defineProperty. It's tricky, but it's always a cat-and-mouse game.

If you've tried everything and still face issues, try asking a question in the issues section or consider using cloud solutions from Rebrowser.

What is Rebrowser?

This package is sponsored and maintained by Rebrowser. We allow you to scale your automation in the cloud with hundreds of unique fingerprints.

Our cloud browsers have great success rates and come with nice features such as notifications if your library uses Runtime.Enable during execution or has other red flags that could be improved. Create an account today to get invited to test our bleeding-edge platform and take your automation business to the next level.

Patch command on Windows

When you try to run this patcher on a Windows machine, you will probably encounter an error because the patch command is not found. To fix this, you need to install Git, which includes patch.exe. After you have installed it, you need to add it to your PATH:

set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\

You can check that patch.exe is installed correctly by using next command:

patch -v

Special thanks

zfcsoftware/puppeteer-real-browser - general ideas and contribution to the automation community

kaliiiiiiiiii/brotector - some modern tests, algorithm to distinguish CDP vs devtools

prescience-data/harden-puppeteer - one of the pioneers of the execution in an isolated world

puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth - where it all started, big props to all the contributors and the community 🙏 berstend and co are the goats

Disclaimer