Ghola

Ghola is a high-performance, Go-based HTTP client designed as a tactical scout for blockchain forensic analysis and browser-like URL fetching. It remains a command-line fetcher, not a scraping framework, and now includes a pure-Go browser impersonation path for transport- and session-level realism.

Attribution: the direction for Ghola's browser-like fetching work was inspired by ideas demonstrated in the Scrapling project by Karim Shoair. Ghola adapts those ideas to a narrower fetcher-only workflow and does not implement Scrapling's scraping or automation features.

Features

Browser-Like Fetching

Flag	Description
-D, --drift <ms>	Temporal Drift -- injects cryptographically random jitter into request timing to evade bot-detection and timing analysis.
-G, --ghost	Ghost Sign -- adds a unique X-Ghola-Identity header (SHA256 hash of timestamp + URL) for distributed auditing and traceability.
--impersonate <profile>	Pure-Go browser impersonation -- use a browser-like transport profile such as chrome, firefox, safari, or edge.
--stealth-headers	Coherent headers -- generate browser-like headers that match the active profile.
--http3	HTTP/3 -- enable HTTP/3 when supported by the active impersonation profile.
--referer <mode>	Referer control -- use none, auto, or an explicit URL.
--accept-language <value>	Locale shaping -- override the profile default Accept-Language.

Forensic & Companion Tools

Flag	Description
-S, --snoop	Snoop Mode -- pre-flight reconnaissance of target headers, security posture, and WAF detection (Cloudflare, X-Ray).
-c, --chain <type>	Chain Shortcuts -- pre-fills RPC headers for eth, base, or solana ecosystems.
-r, --retry <n>	Autonomous Retries -- exponential backoff with configurable base delay (-b).

Core Utility

Flag	Description
-n <int>	Concurrent connections via goroutines (first successful response wins).
-w, --wget	Wget mode -- auto-saves to local file using the inferred remote filename.
-u <user:pass>	Basic Auth -- native HTTP basic authentication.
-T <file>	Upload -- send a local file as the request body.
-o <file>	Output -- write response body to a file.
-H <header>	Custom headers -- repeatable. Default: Content-Type: application/json.
-X <method>	HTTP method -- defaults to GET, auto-switches to POST when -d is used.
-i	Include headers in output.
-v	Verbose -- show ghost signature and extra diagnostics.
-s	Silent -- suppress all output.
-f	Fail on non-2xx HTTP status (exit non-zero, suppress body output).
-L, --location	Follow redirects (HTTP 3xx).
--max-redirs <n>	Max redirects to follow when --location is enabled.
--retry-http	Retry on statuses (e.g. 429, 5xx) in addition to transport failures.
--timeout <ms>	Request timeout in milliseconds (0 disables).
--cookie-jar <file>	Persistent cookies -- save and reuse cookies across runs.
--cookie <name=value>	Seed cookies -- add one or more cookies to the request session.
--proxy <url>	Single proxy -- route traffic through an HTTP proxy.
--proxy-file <path>	Proxy pool -- load proxies from a newline-delimited file.
--proxy-strategy <mode>	Proxy selection -- choose from sticky, random, or round-robin.
--profile-list	List profiles -- print the built-in impersonation profiles and exit.

Installation

Homebrew (macOS / Linux)

brew install robot-accomplice/tap/ghola

To upgrade:

brew upgrade ghola

Quick Install Script

macOS / Linux

bash <(curl -fsSL https://roboticus.ai/ghola-install.sh)

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://roboticus.ai/ghola-install.ps1 | iex

After install, verify with:

ghola --version

Go Install

go install github.com/robot-accomplice/ghola/cmd/ghola@latest

Download Binary

Pre-built binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows are available on the Releases page and at roboticus.ai.

Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/robot-accomplice/ghola.git
cd ghola
go build -o ghola ./cmd/ghola

Ghola now targets Go 1.26 for development and release builds.

Usage

# Basic GET request
ghola https://httpbin.org/get

# Browser-like fetch with a pure-Go Chrome fingerprint
ghola --impersonate chrome --stealth-headers https://example.com

# Stateful probing with persistent cookies
ghola --impersonate firefox --cookie-jar ~/.config/ghola/cookies.json https://example.com

# Proxy-backed browser-like fetch
ghola --impersonate chrome --proxy http://user:pass@proxy.local:8080 https://example.com

# Inspect available impersonation profiles
ghola --profile-list

# POST with data and verbose ghost signing
ghola -vG -d '{"query": "balance"}' https://rpc.example.com

# Snoop mode -- check security posture
ghola -S https://example.com

# Chain-aware request with retries
ghola -c base -r 3 https://rpc.base.org

# Download a file (wget mode)
ghola -w https://example.com/report.pdf

# Concurrent connections with drift jitter
ghola -n 5 -D 200 https://api.example.com/data

Architecture

Ghola is structured as a CLI entrypoint plus focused internal packages:

cmd/ghola/          Entrypoint (os.Exit, arg wiring)
internal/config/    CLI flag parsing, Options, validation
internal/client/    Request pipeline (fetchState, retry, drift, redirect, cookie/session)
internal/transport/ Runtime backend selection (simple or pure-Go impersonation)
internal/profile/   Browser-like profile definitions and header generation
internal/cookies/   Persistent JSON cookie jar
internal/proxy/     Proxy parsing and selection
internal/output/    Response rendering, file I/O, snoop mode

See docs/architecture/ for C4 diagrams and a detailed dataflow walkthrough. See docs/browser-like-fetching.md and docs/pure-go-impersonation.md for the browser-like transport design.

Testing

go test -v -race -coverprofile=coverage.out ./...
go tool cover -func=coverage.out

Coverage is enforced in CI with two gates:

• Each package must be at least 80%
• Coverage must not regress below recorded baselines

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup, testing, and PR guidelines.

Security

To report a vulnerability, see SECURITY.md.

License

MIT -- Copyright (c) 2026 Jonathan Machen