The daemon & the visible browser

browserlane drives a real Chrome window — by default, one you can see.

Visible by default

When you run a browser command, bl opens a visible Chrome for Testing window and performs the action there. This is deliberate: watching automation happen makes it far easier to understand and debug than staring at headless logs.

To hide the window, pass the global --headless flag:

bl go https://example.com --headless

--headless is a global flag, so it works on any command. Use it on servers, in CI, or whenever you don't need to watch.

The daemon keeps Chrome warm

Launching Chrome takes a moment. If every bl command had to start a fresh browser, a sequence of commands would be slow. The daemon solves this: it keeps a browser process running in the background so subsequent commands attach to the already-warm browser and return in well under a second.

bl daemon start    # start the background browser process
bl daemon status   # check whether it's running
bl daemon stop     # stop it

With the daemon running, commands like bl go, bl map, and bl click reuse the same warm browser instead of relaunching per command.

Sessions vs. the daemon

The daemon is about keeping the browser warm across commands. A session is the browser connection itself — see Sessions, storage & auth for bl start / bl stop and connecting to a remote browser.

Related

• bl daemon in the CLI reference.
• Your first automation (CLI).