Headless Browser

The stack includes a chromium container (chromedp/headless-shell) so OpenClaw can use the browser tool on the VPS — useful for scraping JS-heavy or paywalled pages via the agent-browser skill.

How It Works

Chrome’s CDP endpoint rejects WebSocket connections where the Host header is not an IP address or localhost (DNS rebinding protection). To work around this without a proxy, the chromium service is assigned a static IP (172.20.0.10) on a custom Docker bridge subnet (172.20.0.0/24). OpenClaw connects directly to http://172.20.0.10:9222 — Chrome accepts IP addresses unconditionally.

The openclaw.json browser profile:

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"browser": {
  "profiles": {
    "vps": {
      "cdpUrl": "http://172.20.0.10:9222",
      "color": "#00AA00"
    }
  }
}

Verifying the Connection

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make exec CMD="curl -s http://172.20.0.10:9222/json/version"

If that fails (shouldn’t happen unless services are added/removed and the network is recreated), find the new IP:

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make ssh
docker inspect openclaw-chromium-1 | grep IPAddress

Update cdpUrl in openclaw.json and run make deploy.