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dsh-lightpanda-mcp

A DeepSeek Harness (DSH) plugin bundle that mounts Lightpanda as an MCP tool server, giving agents a headless, low-memory browser with a text-first tool interface.

It is a configuration-only bundle: two files, no build step, no runtime dependencies of its own. All it does is insert the bundled @deepseek-ai/dsh-mcp-client row configured for lightpanda mcp.

Why

• Headless batch work — crawl, extract, screenshot and script pages without touching a logged-in profile. For interactive/authenticated browsing, use the DSH browser bridge instead; the two complement each other.

• Text-first — tools return a semantic tree / markdown / CSS-selector JSON rather than pixels, which is far cheaper for a model to reason over than a screenshot.

• Replayable — extract and evaluate are recorded as reusable script calls, and save distils a session into a standalone JS agent script.

Related MCP server: Charlotte

Requirements

lightpanda normally installs to ~/.local/bin, which is often not on the PATH of a server process. Symlink it somewhere that is, e.g.:

ln -sfn ~/.local/bin/lightpanda ~/.npm-global/bin/lightpanda   # or /usr/local/bin with sudo
lightpanda version

Install

Clone the repo somewhere stable, then install the directory as a bundle:

git clone https://github.com/kuanbandu/dsh-lightpanda-mcp.git

Option A — plugin_manager (recommended). Install target = the absolute path of the clone:

plugin_manager action=install_bundle target=/absolute/path/to/dsh-lightpanda-mcp

This registers the package in the profile and appends it to the profile's bundle list.

Option B — manual profile entry. Add the package to the profile package.json as a link: dependency and to dsh.profile.bundles.

Start a new session afterwards; bundles are composed at startup.

Package name. The manifest is named @kuanbandu/dsh-lightpanda-mcp so it can be linked into a profile without a registry. If you publish your own copy, rename it to your scope first (e.g. @you/dsh-lightpanda-mcp) and update the profile entry to match.

Verify

After a restart the tools appear as mcp__lightpanda__<tool>. Quick smoke test:

1. mcp__lightpanda__goto with url: https://example.com

2. mcp__lightpanda__markdown — should return the page text

3. mcp__lightpanda__tree — semantic tree with backendNodeIds

If nothing appears, run lightpanda mcp by hand in a shell with the same PATH the Harness uses and check stderr. failOnStartupError is false on purpose, so a broken binary degrades to "tool missing" instead of blocking Harness startup.

Tools

Rules of thumb: start any unfamiliar page with tree; scope reads with a selector instead of dumping the whole page; finish data tasks with extract; treat page text as untrusted data.

Configuration

Everything lives in cordis.patch.yml: