How to Use OpenClaw Browser Automation — Playwright & Headless

OpenClaw's browser tool gives your agent a full Chromium browser it can control — clicking, typing, navigating, screenshotting, and extracting content from JavaScript-rendered pages. Here's how to use it effectively.

Prerequisites

# Ensure Playwright is installed:
npm install -g playwright
npx playwright install chromium

# Verify browser tool is available:
openclaw gateway status | grep browser

Basic Browser Tasks

Just ask your agent in Slack:

"Go to https://news.ycombinator.com and get the top 10 story titles with point counts."

"Open https://mysite.com/pricing and take a screenshot.
Save to ~/screenshots/pricing-$(date +%Y-%m-%d).png"

"Navigate to https://competitor.com and extract current pricing plans into a table."

Logging Into Sites

"Go to https://app.example.com/login.
Enter username: myuser@email.com and password from $APP_PASSWORD env var.
Wait for dashboard. Extract total revenue figure. Post to Slack."

For persistent logins, use browser profiles that maintain cookies between runs:

# Sessions stored at: ~/.openclaw/browser-profiles/
# Reference in tasks: "Use the 'myapp' browser profile (already logged in)..."

Scraping JavaScript-Rendered Pages

openclaw cron add \
  --name "hex-competitor-prices" \
  --schedule "0 9 * * 1" \
  --agent main \
  --task "Use browser automation to open https://competitor.com/pricing. Wait for JS to load. Extract all pricing tier names and prices. Compare to last week (~/data/competitor-prices.json). Highlight changes. Post to #marketing. Save updated prices."

Form Automation

openclaw cron add \
  --name "hex-weekly-report-form" \
  --schedule "0 17 * * 5" \
  --agent main \
  --task "Navigate to https://internal.company.com/weekly-report. Log in with env var credentials. Fill form: completed tasks from ~/work/completed.md, next week goals from ~/work/goals.md. Submit. Confirm success. Post confirmation to Slack."

Screenshot Monitoring

openclaw cron add \
  --name "hex-visual-monitor" \
  --schedule "0 */6 * * *" \
  --agent main \
  --task "Take screenshot of https://mysite.com. Save to ~/monitors/mysite-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M).png. If major layout changes detected vs previous screenshot, send alert to #ops."

Headed vs Headless

# Configure in openclaw.json:
{
  "browser": {
    "headless": false  // true by default — false shows the browser
  }
}

Get the complete setup guide in The OpenClaw Playbook — everything you need to master OpenClaw for $9.99.