• December 8, 2024

Headless Browser Nodejs

puppeteer/puppeteer: Headless Chrome Node.js API – GitHub

API | FAQ | Contributing | Troubleshooting
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. Puppeteer runs headless by default, but can be configured to run full (non-headless) Chrome or Chromium.
What can I do?
Most things that you can do manually in the browser can be done using Puppeteer! Here are a few examples to get you started:
Generate screenshots and PDFs of pages.
Crawl a SPA (Single-Page Application) and generate pre-rendered content (i. e. “SSR” (Server-Side Rendering)).
Automate form submission, UI testing, keyboard input, etc.
Create an up-to-date, automated testing environment. Run your tests directly in the latest version of Chrome using the latest JavaScript and browser features.
Capture a timeline trace of your site to help diagnose performance issues.
Test Chrome Extensions.
Give it a spin:
Getting Started
Installation
To use Puppeteer in your project, run:
npm i puppeteer
# or “yarn add puppeteer”
Note: When you install Puppeteer, it downloads a recent version of Chromium (~170MB Mac, ~282MB Linux, ~280MB Win) that is guaranteed to work with the API. To skip the download, download into another path, or download a different browser, see Environment variables.
puppeteer-core
Since version 1. 7. 0 we publish the puppeteer-core package,
a version of Puppeteer that doesn’t download any browser by default.
npm i puppeteer-core
# or “yarn add puppeteer-core”
puppeteer-core is intended to be a lightweight version of Puppeteer for launching an existing browser installation or for connecting to a remote one. Be sure that the version of puppeteer-core you install is compatible with the
browser you intend to connect to.
See puppeteer vs puppeteer-core.
Usage
Puppeteer follows the latest maintenance LTS version of Node.
Note: Prior to v1. 18. 1, Puppeteer required at least Node v6. 4. 0. Versions from v1. 1 to v2. 1. 0 rely on
Node 8. 9. 0+. Starting from v3. 0 Puppeteer starts to rely on Node 10. 1+. All examples below use async/await which is only supported in Node v7. 6. 0 or greater.
Puppeteer will be familiar to people using other browser testing frameworks. You create an instance
of Browser, open pages, and then manipulate them with Puppeteer’s API.
Example – navigating to and saving a screenshot as
Save file as
const puppeteer = require(‘puppeteer’);
(async () => {
const browser = await ();
const page = await wPage();
await (”);
await reenshot({ path: ”});
await ();})();
Execute script on the command line
Puppeteer sets an initial page size to 800×600px, which defines the screenshot size. The page size can be customized with tViewport().
Example – create a PDF.
await (”, {
waitUntil: ‘networkidle2’, });
await ({ path: ”, format: ‘a4’});
See () for more information about creating pdfs.
Example – evaluate script in the context of the page
// Get the “viewport” of the page, as reported by the page.
const dimensions = await page. evaluate(() => {
return {
width: ientWidth,
height: ientHeight,
deviceScaleFactor: vicePixelRatio, };});
(‘Dimensions:’, dimensions);
See Page. evaluate() for more information on evaluate and related methods like evaluateOnNewDocument and exposeFunction.
Default runtime settings
1. Uses Headless mode
Puppeteer launches Chromium in headless mode. To launch a full version of Chromium, set the headless option when launching a browser:
const browser = await ({ headless: false}); // default is true
2. Runs a bundled version of Chromium
By default, Puppeteer downloads and uses a specific version of Chromium so its API
is guaranteed to work out of the box. To use Puppeteer with a different version of Chrome or Chromium,
pass in the executable’s path when creating a Browser instance:
const browser = await ({ executablePath: ‘/path/to/Chrome’});
You can also use Puppeteer with Firefox Nightly (experimental support). See () for more information.
See this article for a description of the differences between Chromium and Chrome. This article describes some differences for Linux users.
3. Creates a fresh user profile
Puppeteer creates its own browser user profile which it cleans up on every run.
Resources
API Documentation
Examples
Community list of Puppeteer resources
Debugging tips
Turn off headless mode – sometimes it’s useful to see what the browser is
displaying. Instead of launching in headless mode, launch a full version of
the browser using headless: false:
const browser = await ({ headless: false});
Slow it down – the slowMo option slows down Puppeteer operations by the
specified amount of milliseconds. It’s another way to help see what’s going on.
const browser = await ({
headless: false,
slowMo: 250, // slow down by 250ms});
Capture console output – You can listen for the console event.
This is also handy when debugging code in page. evaluate():
(‘console’, (msg) => (‘PAGE LOG:’, ()));
await page. evaluate(() => (`url is ${}`));
Use debugger in application code browser
There are two execution context: that is running test code, and the browser
running application code being tested. This lets you debug code in the
application code browser; ie code inside evaluate().
Use {devtools: true} when launching Puppeteer:
const browser = await ({ devtools: true});
Change default test timeout:
jest: tTimeout(100000);
jasmine: FAULT_TIMEOUT_INTERVAL = 100000;
mocha: this. timeout(100000); (don’t forget to change test to use function and not ‘=>’)
Add an evaluate statement with debugger inside / add debugger to an existing evaluate statement:
await page. evaluate(() => {
debugger;});
The test will now stop executing in the above evaluate statement, and chromium will stop in debug mode.
Use debugger in
This will let you debug test code. For example, you can step over await () in the script and see the click happen in the application code browser.
Note that you won’t be able to run await () in
DevTools console due to this Chromium bug. So if
you want to try something out, you have to add it to your test file.
Add debugger; to your test, eg:
debugger;
await (‘a[target=_blank]’);
Set headless to false
Run node –inspect-brk, eg node –inspect-brk node_modules/ tests
In Chrome open chromeinspect/#devices and click inspect
In the newly opened test browser, type F8 to resume test execution
Now your debugger will be hit and you can debug in the test browser
Enable verbose logging – internal DevTools protocol traffic
will be logged via the debug module under the puppeteer namespace.
# Basic verbose logging
env DEBUG=”puppeteer:*” node
# Protocol traffic can be rather noisy. This example filters out all Network domain messages
env DEBUG=”puppeteer:*” env DEBUG_COLORS=true node 2>&1 | grep -v ‘”Network’
Debug your Puppeteer (node) code easily, using ndb
npm install -g ndb (or even better, use npx! )
add a debugger to your Puppeteer (node) code
add ndb (or npx ndb) before your test command. For example:
ndb jest or ndb mocha (or npx ndb jest / npx ndb mocha)
debug your test inside chromium like a boss!
Usage with TypeScript
We have recently completed a migration to move the Puppeteer source code from JavaScript to TypeScript and as of version 7. 1 we ship our own built-in type definitions.
If you are on a version older than 7, we recommend installing the Puppeteer type definitions from the DefinitelyTyped repository:
npm install –save-dev @types/puppeteer
The types that you’ll see appearing in the Puppeteer source code are based off the great work of those who have contributed to the @types/puppeteer package. We really appreciate the hard work those people put in to providing high quality TypeScript definitions for Puppeteer’s users.
Contributing to Puppeteer
Check out contributing guide to get an overview of Puppeteer development.
Q: Who maintains Puppeteer?
The Chrome DevTools team maintains the library, but we’d love your help and expertise on the project!
See Contributing.
Q: What is the status of cross-browser support?
Official Firefox support is currently experimental. The ongoing collaboration with Mozilla aims to support common end-to-end testing use cases, for which developers expect cross-browser coverage. The Puppeteer team needs input from users to stabilize Firefox support and to bring missing APIs to our attention.
From Puppeteer v2. 0 onwards you can specify ({product: ‘firefox’}) to run your Puppeteer scripts in Firefox Nightly, without any additional custom patches. While an older experiment required a patched version of Firefox, the current approach works with “stock” Firefox.
We will continue to collaborate with other browser vendors to bring Puppeteer support to browsers such as Safari.
This effort includes exploration of a standard for executing cross-browser commands (instead of relying on the non-standard DevTools Protocol used by Chrome).
Q: What are Puppeteer’s goals and principles?
The goals of the project are:
Provide a slim, canonical library that highlights the capabilities of the DevTools Protocol.
Provide a reference implementation for similar testing libraries. Eventually, these other frameworks could adopt Puppeteer as their foundational layer.
Grow the adoption of headless/automated browser testing.
Help dogfood new DevTools Protocol catch bugs!
Learn more about the pain points of automated browser testing and help fill those gaps.
We adapt Chromium principles to help us drive product decisions:
Speed: Puppeteer has almost zero performance overhead over an automated page.
Security: Puppeteer operates off-process with respect to Chromium, making it safe to automate potentially malicious pages.
Stability: Puppeteer should not be flaky and should not leak memory.
Simplicity: Puppeteer provides a high-level API that’s easy to use, understand, and debug.
Q: Is Puppeteer replacing Selenium/WebDriver?
No. Both projects are valuable for very different reasons:
Selenium/WebDriver focuses on cross-browser automation; its value proposition is a single standard API that works across all major browsers.
Puppeteer focuses on Chromium; its value proposition is richer functionality and higher reliability.
That said, you can use Puppeteer to run tests against Chromium, e. g. using the community-driven jest-puppeteer. While this probably shouldn’t be your only testing solution, it does have a few good points compared to WebDriver:
Puppeteer requires zero setup and comes bundled with the Chromium version it works best with, making it very easy to start with. At the end of the day, it’s better to have a few tests running chromium-only, than no tests at all.
Puppeteer has event-driven architecture, which removes a lot of potential flakiness. There’s no need for evil “sleep(1000)” calls in puppeteer scripts.
Puppeteer runs headless by default, which makes it fast to run. Puppeteer v1. 5. 0 also exposes browser contexts, making it possible to efficiently parallelize test execution.
Puppeteer shines when it comes to debugging: flip the “headless” bit to false, add “slowMo”, and you’ll see what the browser is doing. You can even open Chrome DevTools to inspect the test environment.
Q: Why doesn’t Puppeteer work with Chromium
We see Puppeteer as an indivisible entity with Chromium. Each version of Puppeteer bundles a specific version of Chromium – the only version it is guaranteed to work with.
This is not an artificial constraint: A lot of work on Puppeteer is actually taking place in the Chromium repository. Here’s a typical story:
A Puppeteer bug is reported: It turned out this is an issue with the DevTools protocol, so we’re fixing it in Chromium: Once the upstream fix is landed, we roll updated Chromium into Puppeteer:
However, oftentimes it is desirable to use Puppeteer with the official Google Chrome rather than Chromium. For this to work, you should install a puppeteer-core version that corresponds to the Chrome version.
For example, in order to drive Chrome 71 with puppeteer-core, use chrome-71 npm tag:
npm install puppeteer-core@chrome-71
Q: Which Chromium version does Puppeteer use?
Look for the chromium entry in To find the corresponding Chromium commit and version number, search for the revision prefixed by an r in OmahaProxy’s “Find Releases” section.
Q: Which Firefox version does Puppeteer use?
Since Firefox support is experimental, Puppeteer downloads the latest Firefox Nightly when the PUPPETEER_PRODUCT environment variable is set to firefox. That’s also why the value of firefox in is latest — Puppeteer isn’t tied to a particular Firefox version.
To fetch Firefox Nightly as part of Puppeteer installation:
PUPPETEER_PRODUCT=firefox npm i puppeteer
Q: What’s considered a “Navigation”?
From Puppeteer’s standpoint, “navigation” is anything that changes a page’s URL.
Aside from regular navigation where the browser hits the network to fetch a new document from the web server, this includes anchor navigations and History API usage.
With this definition of “navigation, ” Puppeteer works seamlessly with single-page applications.
Q: What’s the difference between a “trusted” and “untrusted” input event?
In browsers, input events could be divided into two big groups: trusted vs. untrusted.
Trusted events: events generated by users interacting with the page, e. using a mouse or keyboard.
Untrusted event: events generated by Web APIs, e. eateEvent or () methods.
Websites can distinguish between these two groups:
using an Trusted event flag
sniffing for accompanying events. For example, every trusted ‘click’ event is preceded by ‘mousedown’ and ‘mouseup’ events.
For automation purposes it’s important to generate trusted events. All input events generated with Puppeteer are trusted and fire proper accompanying events. If, for some reason, one needs an untrusted event, it’s always possible to hop into a page context with page. evaluate and generate a fake event:
document. querySelector(‘button[type=submit]’)();});
Q: What features does Puppeteer not support?
You may find that Puppeteer does not behave as expected when controlling pages that incorporate audio and video. (For example, video playback/screenshots is likely to fail. ) There are two reasons for this:
Puppeteer is bundled with Chromium — not Chrome — and so by default, it inherits all of Chromium’s media-related limitations. This means that Puppeteer does not support licensed formats such as AAC or H. 264. (However, it is possible to force Puppeteer to use a separately-installed version Chrome instead of Chromium via the executablePath option to You should only use this configuration if you need an official release of Chrome that supports these media formats. )
Since Puppeteer (in all configurations) controls a desktop version of Chromium/Chrome, features that are only supported by the mobile version of Chrome are not supported. This means that Puppeteer does not support HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).
Q: I am having trouble installing / running Puppeteer in my test environment. Where should I look for help?
We have a troubleshooting guide for various operating systems that lists the required dependencies.
Q: Chromium gets downloaded on every npm ci run. How can I cache the download?
The default download path is node_modules/puppeteer/ However, you can change that path with the PUPPETTER_DOWNLOAD_PATH environment variable.
Puppeteer uses that variable to resolve the Chromium executable location during launch, so you don’t need to specify PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH as well.
For example, if you wish to keep the Chromium download in ~/
export PUPPETEER_DOWNLOAD_PATH=~/
npm ci
# by default the Chromium executable path is inferred
# from the download path
npm test
# a new run of npm ci will check for the existence of
# Chromium in ~/
Q: How do I try/test a prerelease version of Puppeteer?
You can check out this repo or install the latest prerelease from npm:
npm i –save puppeteer@next
Please note that prerelease may be unstable and contain bugs.
Q: I have more questions! Where do I ask?
There are many ways to get help on Puppeteer:
bugtracker
Stack Overflow
Make sure to search these channels before posting your question.
Zombie.js | Zombie

Zombie.js | Zombie

Insanely fast, full-stack, headless browser testing using
View the Project on GitHub
Download ZIP File
Download TAR Ball
View On GitHub
Insanely fast, headless full-stack testing using
Zombie 6. x is tested to work with Node 8 or later.
If you need to use Node 6, consider using Zombie 5. x.
The Bite
If you’re going to write an insanely fast, headless browser, how can you not
call it Zombie? Zombie it is.
is a lightweight framework for testing client-side JavaScript code in
a simulated environment. No browser required.
Let’s try to sign up to a page and see what happens:
const Browser = require(‘zombie’);
// We’re going to make requests to // Which will be routed to our test server localhost:3000
Browser. localhost(”, 3000);
describe(‘User visits signup page’, function() {
const browser = new Browser();
before(function(done) {
(‘/signup’, done);});
describe(‘submits form’, function() {
browser
(’email’, ”)
(‘password’, ‘eat-the-living’). pressButton(‘Sign Me Up! ‘, done);});
it(‘should be successful’, function() {
();});
it(‘should see welcome page’, function() {
(‘title’, ‘Welcome To Brains Depot’);});});});
This example uses the Mocha testing
framework, but Zombie will work with other testing frameworks. Since Mocha
supports promises, we can also write the test like this:
before(function() {
return (‘/signup’);});
(‘password’, ‘eat-the-living’);
return essButton(‘Sign Me Up! ‘);});
Well, that was easy.
Table of Contents
Installing
Browser
Assertions
Cookies
Tabs
Debugging
Events
Resources
Pipeline
To install you will need
$ npm install zombie –save-dev
Methods for making assertions against the browser, such as
(”).
See Assertions for detailed discussion.
ferer
You can use this to set the HTTP Referer header.
sources
Access to history of retrieved resources. See Resources for
detailed discussion.
browser. pipeline
Access to the pipeline for making requests and processing responses. Use this
to add new request/response handlers the pipeline for a single browser instance,
or use dHandler to modify all instances. See
Pipeline.
Array of all open tabs (windows). Allows you to operate on more than one open
window at a time.
See Tabs for detailed discussion.
The proxy option takes a URL so you can tell Zombie what protocol, host and
port to use. Also supports Basic authentication, e. g. :
= ‘me:secret@myproxy:8080’
Collection of errors accumulated by the browser while loading page and executing
scripts.
Returns a string of the source HTML from the last response.
(element)
Returns a string of HTML for a selected HTML element. If argument element is undefined, the function returns a string of the source HTML from the last response.
Example uses:
(‘div’);
(‘div#contain’);
(‘. selector’);
();
Browser. localhost(host, port)
Allows you to make requests against a named domain and HTTP/S port, and will
route it to the test server running on localhost and unprivileged port.
For example, if you want to call your application “”, and redirect
traffic from port 80 to the test server that’s listening on port 3000, you can
do this:
Browser. localhost(”, 3000)
(‘/path’, function() {
=> ”
The first time you call Browser. localhost, if you didn’t specify, it will set it to the hostname (in the above example,
“”). Whenever you call with a relative URL, it
appends it to, so you don’t need to repeat the full URL in every
test case.
You can use wildcards to map domains and all hosts within these domains, and you
can specify the source port to map protocols other than HTTP. For example:
// HTTP requests for will be answered by localhost
// server running on port 3000
Browser. localhost(‘*. ‘, 3000);
// HTTPS requests will be answered by localhost server running on port 3001
Browser. ‘, 3001);
The underlying implementation hacks, so it will route any
TCP connection made by the Node application, whether Zombie or any other
library. It does not affect other processes running on your machine.
You can use this to customize new browser instances for your specific needs.
The extension function is called for every new browser instance, and can change
properties, bind methods, register event listeners, etc.
(function(browser) {
(‘console’, function(level, message) {
(message);});
(‘log’, function(level, message) {
(message);});});
Browser. evaluate
You can use this to evaluate javascript in the browser, it’s similar to
Browser. evaluate(‘document. querySelector(“a”)’)
To make life easier, Zombie introduces a set of convenience assertions that you
can access directly from the browser object. For example, to check that a page
loaded successfully:
(‘title’, ‘My Awesome Site’);
(‘#main’);
These assertions are available from the browser object since they operate on a
particular browser instance – generally dependent on the currently open window,
or document loaded in that window.
Many assertions require an element/elements as the first argument, for example,
to compare the text content (), or attribute value
(tribute). You can pass one of the following values:
An HTML element or an array of HTML elements
A CSS selector string (e. “h2”, “”, “#first-name”)
Many assertions take an expected value and compare it against the actual value.
For example, compares the expected value against the text contents
of one or more strings. The expected value can be one of:
A JavaScript primitive value (string, number)
undefined or null are used to assert the lack of value
A regular expression
A function that is called with the actual value and returns true if the
assertion is true
Any other object will be matched using epEqual
Note that in some cases the DOM specification indicates that lack of value is an
empty string, not null/undefined.
All assertions take an optional last argument that is the message to show if the
assertion fails. Better yet, use a testing framework like
Mocha that has good diff support and
don’t worry about these messages.
Available Assertions
The following assertions are available:
tribute(selection, name, expected, message)
Asserts the named attribute of the selected element(s) has the expected value.
Fails if no element found.
(‘form’, ‘method’, ‘post’);
(‘form’, ‘action’, ‘/customer/new’);
// Disabled with no attribute value, i. e.

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