Releases: steel-dev/steel-browser
Release v0.1.2-beta
The feedback and community support on Steel's beta has been beyond incredible. We've heard to your wishes, aches, pains, and with this release, we're bundling a variety of fixes and improvements that have been shipped over the last 2 months. Even a few new features!
New feature highlights
🎛️ Dimensions for sessions
We now support the ability to set screen + viewport dimensions when creating a session (POST /v1/sessions).
from steel import Steel
client = Steel(
base_url="https://localhost:3000"
)
session = client.sessions.create(
dimensions={
"width":1280,
"height":800
}
)This helps save you from having to set page viewport on every page load. Which can cause buggy resizing behaviour with your sessions.
😴 Ad blocking
You can now block ads from rendering in your sessions. This is useful for saving on proxy bandwidth, simplifying action space for agents (so they don’t have the option of clicking on ads), and generally speeding up page load times.
It defaults to true when starting a session but you can explicitly turn it on/off by passing a bool into the blockAds param in the create session endpoint (POST /v1/sessions) or via the SDK like so:
from steel import Steel
client = Steel(
base_url="https://localhost:3000"
)
session = client.sessions.create(
block_ads=true
)Bug fixes
- b886f1 fix(api): logging listeners not being used
- 51d4c4 fix(ui): recording issue
- ec95f2 fix(recording): allow 0.0.0.0:3000 to be safely called without https
- 15fa81 fix: error with browser actions running two consecutive requests
- 26497 fix: issues loading cnn and other sites + performance improvements
- 13d7c2 Add gitattributes to ensure line endings are set to LF for all OSs (shoutout @BrentBrightling)
- f72d3a fix: make DEFAULT_HEADERS actually optional
- 2c99bf fix: add support for 'Program Files (x86)' path (shoutout @raymelon)
- 0e141e fix: stray chrome processes causing buildup
- 4dad8f Fix Puppeteer Crash: Remove --disable-software-rasterizer (shoutout @danew)
- 42b67c Fix Xvfb & DBus Startup Issues in Docker Compose (shoutout @danew)
Improvements
- afac76 chore: add issue template
- ad393a fix: session recording events to be sent on extension side
- 62af6d feat: basic ad blocking by hostname + handling proxy server shutdown
- 5a8dff Graceful shutdown: wait for session to be released (shoutout @Envek)
- 05d5b3 Optimize Dockerfile to reduce number of layers and speedup build (shoutout @Envek)
- 71a74b Feat/configurable setup (shoutout @21e8)
- d7793e fix: update manifest version to v3 and push improvements to session recorder
- cabe39 feat: add CHROME_EXECUTABLE_PATH environment variable for custom chromium binaries (shoutout @QAComet)
- 62013e Measure traffic usage if proxy server is specified (shoutout @Envek)
- c96edf fix: ensure requests made back to the API are not proxied
- 1a6e69 fix: remove env requirement for local dev
- db1c23 chore: migrate rq to tanstack-query (shoutout @mislavjc)
- 32b0bf Docker Local Dev Host (shoutout @Emmanuel-Melon)
First-time Contributors!
Special thanks to the following new contributors who've made the above improvements possible 💖
@marclave, @krichprollsch, @BrentBrightling , @Envek, @danew, @raymelon, @21e8, @QAComet, @mislavjc, and @Emmanuel-Melon
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Contributors
Assets 2
Release v0.1.1-beta.1
Changelog
Bug fixes
- f14cf7d fix(api): switched to using chrome in backend API to fix docker image build issue
Improvements
- f14cf7d feat: introducing docker compose back and splitting apps out to their own images
- f14cf7d feat(api): added extension for better recording
- f14cf7d chore(ui): a little clean up
- e50f085 chore: removed root docker file and updated readme slightly
- 0115134 fix: update the gh actions to build separate images
Come Hang Out
Release v0.1.1-beta
Morning anon 🔮
Welcome to the steel.dev v0.1.1-dev release! We listened to your feedback, and the big focus was on making the open-source experience smoother and getting started with Steel easier than ever.
For those new to Steel, we're an open-source browser API built specifically for AI agents. Our pitch is simple: you focus on creating amazing AI products that plug into the web, and we'll handle all the browser infra headaches.
This beta release is a step on the way to steel becoming the most powerful tool in the AI Dev’s Toolkit. Your suggestions, ideas, and reported bugs help us immensely. Don’t hesitate to join in the conversation on Discord or raise a GitHub issue. We read everything, respond to most, and love you.
SDK Compatibility for Self-Hosted Steel
Now, you can use our Node.js and Python SDKs with self-hosted Steel instances. Just point the baseUrl to your API host when initializing the client:
from steel import Steel
client = Steel(
# Point base URL to your locally hosted instance
baseURL="localhost:3000"
)Note: Direct API calls are still needed for the /scrape, /screenshot, and /pdf endpoints, as they're not yet supported via SDK or Steel Cloud.
Now, speaking of hosting…
Deployment, Simplified
We're super pumped to introduce new ways to install and self-host steel that make the process a breeze.
One-Click Cloud Deployment
You can now deploy steel to Railway or Render as a live API in 1-click. Pretty neat, right? Just hit one of the buttons on the steel-dev/steel-browser repo to try it out yourself.
Quick Docker Setup
Get Steel running locally in seconds using our GHCR-hosted Docker image:
docker run -p 3000:3000 -p 5173:5173 -p 9223:9223 ghcr.io/steel-dev/steel-browser:latest
Self-hosted UI
You loved Steel Cloud's UI, so we built a lightweight version right into the open-source repo. Self-hosted instances now come with a clean interface to view live browser sessions, stats, logs, and Chrome dev tools for improved observability and debugging.
Introducing the Steel Cookbook
We've launched the Steel Cookbook— your go-to resource for Steel API examples and guides. This is where we'll build code examples and even full-on apps that use Steel to build AI x Web Automation projects. If you're interested in contributing, see our contributing guide for information on adding new recipes and examples.
It launched with starter projects for using Steel with - Puppeteer, Selenium, Playwright, and Playwight-python. Along with Replit & Stackblitz projects/templates to run the examples online.
