Lightpanda Go MCP Server

Overview

The Lightpanda Go MCP server, gomcp, bridges the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem with a lightweight headless browser built on Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). It allows AI assistants such as Claude to execute web‑automation tasks, scrape data, or render pages without exposing a full browser stack. By acting as an MCP server, gomcp can be plugged into any AI workflow that supports standard‑input/output or Server‑Sent Events, enabling developers to enrich conversational agents with real‑time web interactions.

gomcp solves the common problem of limited browser access for AI assistants. Traditional approaches require developers to manage a separate Selenium or Puppeteer instance, which adds complexity and resource overhead. gomcp encapsulates all CDP interactions behind a simple MCP interface, handling browser lifecycle, connection management, and protocol translation internally. This abstraction lets developers focus on defining high‑level tasks—such as “open a news article and summarize its content”—while gomcp takes care of the underlying page navigation, DOM extraction, and data conversion.

Key capabilities include:

• Headless browser provisioning: On first run, gomcp downloads the Lightpanda binary and launches it locally or connects to a remote CDP endpoint.
• CDP‑to‑MCP translation: It exposes CDP actions (navigation, element selection, screenshot capture) as MCP tools that can be invoked by an AI assistant.
• Multiple transport options: gomcp supports both for local, process‑based communication and SSE for HTTP‑based, event‑driven interactions.
• Configuration flexibility: Developers can easily integrate gomcp into Claude Desktop or any MCP‑compatible client by adding a simple entry to the configuration file.

Typical use cases include:

• Dynamic content scraping: An assistant can fetch data from JavaScript‑heavy sites, convert the DOM to Markdown, and return structured results.
• Automated testing: AI can run end‑to‑end tests against a web application by issuing navigation and assertion commands through MCP.
• Real‑time data extraction: In a chat interface, the assistant can pull live stock prices or weather information by rendering the corresponding web pages and parsing the output.

gomcp’s standout advantage lies in its minimal footprint and Go‑based implementation, which delivers fast startup times and low memory usage compared to heavyweight browser automation stacks. By providing a turnkey MCP server that speaks CDP, it streamlines the integration of web interaction into AI workflows, empowering developers to build richer, more capable conversational agents with minimal effort.