Chrome DevTools CLI for Claude Code

I’ve been using Claude Code to build many wondrous (but often half working) things. Part of that is getting it to test on it’s own in a web browser. The official Chrome DevTools MCP kept freezing up while I was using it with a Meta Quest 3, and when it did work, asking for console logs would return massive amounts of data that filled my context (are there more dreaded words than “Compacting Conversation…”?).

Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) is Chrome’s way of letting external programs control the browser - taking screenshots, evaluating JavaScript, monitoring network traffic. Most CDP tools are libraries meant to be imported into code, but Claude Code needs a CLI.

I built @myerscarpenter/cdp-cli. It outputs NDJSON (newline-delimited JSON) - one complete JSON object per line, making it grep-compatible and easy to parse.

The key feature is the console command. By default it outputs bare JSON strings and shows only the last 10 messages:

cdp-cli console "GitHub"
"Page loaded"
"API call successful"

This saves tokens. When you need more detail, flags like --verbose, --tail 50, or --all give you control over how much data comes back. When truncated, it warns on stderr so Claude Code knows there’s more available.

I’m also liking using cli’s over mcp’s as you can see exactly what it’s doing.

Chrome needs to be running with remote debugging enabled:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome \
  --remote-debugging-port=9222

Or you could ask Claude to port forward 9222 from your Quest with adb.

Then install and use:

npm install -g @myerscarpenter/cdp-cli
cdp-cli tabs
cdp-cli console "GitHub" --tail 5
cdp-cli screenshot "GitHub" --output screenshot.jpg

Commands cover page management (tabs, new, go, close), debugging (console, snapshot, eval, screenshot), network inspection, and input automation (click, fill, key).

See it on GitHub and npm.