Steel

Steel is an open-source browser API that lets you control fleets of browsers in the cloud.

Since Val Town can’t run browsers locally, Steel provides a way to run browser automation tools like Puppeteer and Playwright by connecting to remote browsers hosted on Steel’s infrastructure.

Quick start with Puppeteer

The quickest way to get started with Puppeteer is to get your Steel API key and remix this val.

1. Remix this Steel Puppeteer val
2. Get your free Steel API key
3. Add it to your Environment Variables (via left sidebar of your val) as STEEL_API_KEY
4. Click Run on the main.tsx file
5. View the output in the logs

Note

To use Puppeteer in Val Town, we recommend using the deno-puppeteer library – as is done in the above starter val.

Quick start with Playwright

You can also use Playwright with Steel on Val Town.

Similar to the setup instructions above:

1. Remix this Steel Playwright val
2. Get your free Steel API key
3. Add it to your Environment Variables (via left sidebar of your val) as STEEL_API_KEY
4. Set TMPDIR to /tmp in your Environment Variables to avoid warnings
5. Click Run on the main.ts file
6. View the output in the logs

Note

We use a small script to handle Playwright’s file system requirements in Val Town.

Also, each Steel API key supports only one active browser session. Starting a new session will close any existing session.