Camofox recover lane

Opt-in serial lane that talks to an external camofox-browser REST server (Camoufox / Firefox with accessibility snapshots). It runs after vault Playwright lanes (scholar / ezproxy / htmlpdf) and before the LLM browser_agent lane.

This is not a Cloudflare-bypass product and not a drop-in replacement for browser-use. It does not reuse the vault Chromium SSO profile.

When to use it

  • Soft bot walls or publisher landings where a scripted PDF link / download control is enough

  • You want a cheaper try before spending LLM steps in browser_agent

Skip it when the PDF needs campus SSO that only lives in the vault Chrome profile — keep using EZProxy / Scholar / browser_agent for those.

Mileage varies. On real collections Camofox often returns not_found, skipped, or captcha (Cloudflare / publisher bot walls, empty download artifacts, sites with no clear PDF control). Treat it as a best-effort opt-in — not something to rely on for completion rates. Prefer HTTP / vault lanes; keep Camofox (and browser_agent) off when you want a predictable run.

Setup

  1. Run the server (once per machine):

npx @askjo/camofox-browser
# -> http://127.0.0.1:9377

Or Docker / source install from the upstream README.

  1. Enable the lane in config.toml:

[camofox]
enabled = true
during_run = true
base_url = "http://127.0.0.1:9377"
max_wall_s = 90

  1. Optional: if the server sets CAMOFOX_ACCESS_KEY, export the same value in the Paperful environment so requests send Authorization: Bearer ….

  2. Check readiness:

paperful doctor

Behaviour

On run / all / snowball full-stack, Paperful injects camofox when [camofox].enabled and during_run are on (override with --camofox / --no-camofox). The same vault-miss / soft-block gate as browser_agent applies: the lane is skipped unless a vault browser lane was tried and failed (or OA soft-blocked).

For each eligible item Paperful:

  1. Opens a camofox tab on the DOI or item URL

  2. Tries inline PDF capture (fetch-current-resource) and download artifacts

  3. Ranks page links with the same PDF heuristics used elsewhere

  4. Clicks / navigates a few candidates and polls downloads

  5. Validates %PDF + min_pdf_bytes, then stamps source=camofox

CAPTCHA / Cloudflare-looking snapshots return captcha and fall through to browser_agent when that lane is also on.

Privacy

Upstream camofox can send anonymized crash telemetry. For campus or sensitive hosts, set CAMOFOX_CRASH_REPORT_ENABLED=false on the server process (see upstream docs). Paperful never starts the Node process and never forwards page HTML to a remote LLM on this lane.