explaingit

checkly/headless-recorder

Analysis updated 2026-06-24

★ 15,276JavaScriptAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5LicenseSetup · moderate

TLDR

Deprecated Chrome extension that recorded browser clicks and typing then emitted a runnable Playwright or Puppeteer script. No longer maintained as of December 2022.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((headless-recorder))
    Inputs
      Browser clicks and typing
      Form input
      Page loads
    Outputs
      Playwright script
      Puppeteer script
      Screenshots
    Use Cases
      Record a happy path test
      Skip writing selectors by hand
      Bootstrap end-to-end tests
    Tech Stack
      JavaScript
      Chrome Extension
      Playwright
      Puppeteer
Click or tap to explore — scroll the page freely

Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

filefunction / class

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Generate a starter Playwright script by clicking through a user flow

USE CASE 2

Capture CSS selectors for elements without opening DevTools

USE CASE 3

Fork the codebase to build a maintained Playwright recorder

USE CASE 4

Study a Chrome extension that hooks into page events to generate code

What is it built with?

JavaScriptChrome ExtensionPlaywrightPuppeteer

How does it compare?

checkly/headless-recordercesiumgs/cesiumstephentian/33-js-concepts
Stars15,27615,27015,287
LanguageJavaScriptJavaScriptJavaScript
Setup difficultymoderatemoderateeasy
Complexity2/54/51/5
Audiencedeveloperdeveloperdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Project is fully deprecated since December 2022, no updates or fixes are coming.

MIT license, free to fork even though the project is no longer maintained.

In plain English

Headless Recorder was a Chrome extension that recorded your browser interactions, clicks, typing, navigation, and automatically generated a ready-to-run Playwright or Puppeteer script. Playwright and Puppeteer are tools that let developers control a browser programmatically, often used for testing websites or automating repetitive tasks. Instead of writing that automation code by hand, you could just use the browser normally while the extension watched and wrote the code for you. While it was active, the extension could capture click events, double-clicks, form changes, keyboard input, dropdown selections, and page loads. It also offered extras like pausing and resuming a recording session, previewing CSS selectors (the identifiers that point to specific page elements), taking full-page or element screenshots, and copying the generated script to your clipboard. Scripts could also be run directly on Checkly, a monitoring platform made by the same team. Note that as of December 16th, 2022, Headless Recorder is fully deprecated, no new changes, support, maintenance, or features are planned. The README points to an issue thread for more information and possible alternatives. The project was released under the MIT license.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me a modern maintained alternative to checkly/headless-recorder that still generates Playwright scripts
Prompt 2
Explain how headless-recorder captures click and input events from a page and turns them into Puppeteer code
Prompt 3
Walk me through forking headless-recorder and updating it to work with current Playwright APIs
Prompt 4
Help me extract just the selector preview feature from headless-recorder into my own extension

Frequently asked questions

What is headless-recorder?

Deprecated Chrome extension that recorded browser clicks and typing then emitted a runnable Playwright or Puppeteer script. No longer maintained as of December 2022.

What language is headless-recorder written in?

Mainly JavaScript. The stack also includes JavaScript, Chrome Extension, Playwright.

What license does headless-recorder use?

MIT license, free to fork even though the project is no longer maintained.

How hard is headless-recorder to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is headless-recorder for?

Mainly developer.

Open on GitHub → Explain another repo

This repo across BitVibe Labs

Scan in gitsafehub Deploy in gitdeployhub checkly on gitmyhub

Verify against the repo before relying on details.

Alternatives & similar repos