Introducing sortie: local-first web agents

Jun 11, 2026

Jeroen Nouws

Maintainer

A sortie is a mission launched out from a garrison: go out, do the job, come back. That’s exactly what this tool does — you give it a goal, it ventures out onto the web in a real browser, and it comes back with structured data.

sortie is an open-source, local-first platform for autonomous web agents. Describe the data you want in plain language plus a schema, and sortie drives a real Chromium browser, locates content by meaning rather than brittle CSS/XPath selectors, and returns clean, schema-validated JSON. For multi-step tasks — “log in, search for X, collect the first 20 results” — an agent loop plans and executes navigation, clicks, typing, and pagination, recovering from failures along the way.

Why local-first

Plenty of hosted services will run a browser fleet for you. sortie makes the opposite bet: everything runs on your machine. Your sessions, your credentials, your scraped data — none of it transits someone else’s cloud.

That choice shapes the security model:

Credentials never reach the model. Goals and traces only ever contain {{cred:NAME}} placeholders; substitution happens at the moment of typing, observations are scrubbed, and values are never persisted.
Login sessions stay on disk. Named profiles are stored at 0600 permissions, never enter the database, and are never returned by the API.
Bring your own LLM. Anthropic, OpenAI, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — including a fully local Ollama or vLLM. With a local model and a SearXNG sidecar, the whole loop runs without a single external API call.

And one boundary worth stating plainly: CAPTCHA solving and anti-bot evasion are out of scope, permanently. Runs that hit such walls fail gracefully with a clear reason. Be polite to the sites you automate.

What’s in the box

CLI — extract, agent, search, fetch, saved query replays, login profile management, concurrent batch runs, and runs history/export.
Typed SDK — zod schemas in, inferred types out.
REST + WebSocket server with a playground UI: author a run, watch it execute step by step with screenshots.
MCP server — give Claude Code (or any MCP-capable agent) the web as an API: web_search, web_fetch, web_extract, run_agent, and more.

Open source, AGPL

sortie is AGPL-3.0: use it, modify it, self-host it freely — and if you run a modified version as a service, share your changes under the same terms.

The code is on GitHub at garrison-hq/sortie. Start with the getting started guide, and come say hi in the issues if you build something with it — or if something breaks.