# scrapinghub/splash

Lightweight, scriptable browser as a service with an HTTP API

Repository: https://github.com/scrapinghub/splash
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/splash
Language: Python
License: BSD-3-Clause
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2024-08-02T09:30:47+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 32/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4853, "days_push": 761, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4187, forks 510 (observed 2026-08-28T04:08:38.674693+00:00)

## What it is
Splash is a lightweight, scriptable headless browser exposed as a service with an HTTP API, implemented in Python 3 using Twisted and Qt5. It renders JavaScript-heavy web pages and is commonly paired with Scrapy via the scrapy-splash integration.

## Use cases
- render javascript on pages before scraping
- get html of a page that requires js execution
- take screenshots of web pages via an http api
- run custom lua scripts in a headless browser
- integrate js rendering into scrapy spiders
- self-host a stateless rendering service

## When to choose
- you need a lightweight, stateless js-rendering service with a simple http api
- you use scrapy and want javascript rendering via scrapy-splash
- you want to script browser behavior with lua over http

## When to avoid
- you need full modern browser automation with devtools protocol - prefer playwright or puppeteer
- you need actively developed software with recent feature work
- you need a real interactive browser session rather than stateless rendering

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: maintenance
- function: http-server, web-scraping, http-client
- domain: web-development, crawlers, developer-tools
- platform: python, self-hosted
- tags: javascript-rendering, headless-browser, scrapy, twisted, qt5, browser-as-a-service, linux, docker

## Member repositories
- scrapinghub/splash (main) score 32

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:38.674693+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:22:37.508124+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/scrapinghub/splash (fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:38.674693+00:00, sha b67fdf04c892)
  - registry_pypi: https://pypi.org/pypi/splash/json (fetched 2026-08-29T09:13:02.739535+00:00, sha 52adcc0b7ca1)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.