puppeteer-extra

What is puppeteer-extra?

puppeteer-extra is a modular plugin framework for the popular headless browser automation library Puppeteer. It allows users to easily extend Puppeteer's functionality with plugins, making it more versatile and powerful for various web scraping, automation, and testing tasks.

What are puppeteer-extra's main functionalities?

Stealth Plugin

The Stealth Plugin helps to avoid detection by various anti-bot measures on websites. It modifies the browser's behavior to make it look more like a regular user.

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra');
const StealthPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth');
puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin());
(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: true });
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'example.png' });
  await browser.close();
})();

Adblocker Plugin

The Adblocker Plugin blocks ads and trackers, making page loads faster and reducing the amount of data processed.

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra');
const AdblockerPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-adblocker');
puppeteer.use(AdblockerPlugin());
(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: true });
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'example.png' });
  await browser.close();
})();

Recaptcha Plugin

The Recaptcha Plugin helps to solve reCAPTCHAs automatically using third-party services like 2Captcha, making it easier to automate interactions with websites that use CAPTCHA challenges.

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra');
const RecaptchaPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-recaptcha');
puppeteer.use(RecaptchaPlugin({ provider: { id: '2captcha', token: 'YOUR_2CAPTCHA_API_KEY' } }));
(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: true });
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  const { captchas } = await page.solveRecaptchas();
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'example.png' });
  await browser.close();
})();

Other packages similar to puppeteer-extra

puppeteer

Puppeteer is the core library for headless browser automation. It provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. While it is powerful, it lacks the modular plugin system of puppeteer-extra, making it less flexible for certain tasks.

playwright

Playwright is a newer library from Microsoft that provides similar functionality to Puppeteer but supports multiple browsers (Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit). It offers a more robust and versatile API but does not have a plugin system like puppeteer-extra.

selenium-webdriver

Selenium WebDriver is a widely-used tool for browser automation that supports multiple browsers and programming languages. It is more mature and has a larger community but is generally considered more complex and slower compared to Puppeteer and puppeteer-extra.

README

puppeteer-extra

A light-weight wrapper around puppeteer and friends to enable cool plugins through a clean interface.

Installation

yarn add puppeteer puppeteer-extra
# - or -
npm install puppeteer puppeteer-extra

# puppeteer-extra works with any puppeteer version:
yarn add puppeteer@2.0.0 puppeteer-extra

Quickstart

// puppeteer-extra is a drop-in replacement for puppeteer,
// it augments the installed puppeteer with plugin functionality.
// Any number of plugins can be added through `puppeteer.use()`
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra')

// Add stealth plugin and use defaults (all tricks to hide puppeteer usage)
const StealthPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth')
puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin())

// Add adblocker plugin to block all ads and trackers (saves bandwidth)
const AdblockerPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-adblocker')
puppeteer.use(AdblockerPlugin({ blockTrackers: true }))

// That's it, the rest is puppeteer usage as normal 😊
puppeteer.launch({ headless: true }).then(async browser => {
  const page = await browser.newPage()
  await page.setViewport({ width: 800, height: 600 })

  console.log(`Testing adblocker plugin..`)
  await page.goto('https://www.vanityfair.com')
  await page.waitForTimeout(1000)
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'adblocker.png', fullPage: true })

  console.log(`Testing the stealth plugin..`)
  await page.goto('https://bot.sannysoft.com')
  await page.waitForTimeout(5000)
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'stealth.png', fullPage: true })

  console.log(`All done, check the screenshots. ✨`)
  await browser.close()
})

The above example uses the stealth and adblocker plugin, which need to be installed as well:

yarn add puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth puppeteer-extra-plugin-adblocker
# - or -
npm install puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth puppeteer-extra-plugin-adblocker

If you'd like to see debug output just run your script like so:

DEBUG=puppeteer-extra,puppeteer-extra-plugin:* node myscript.js

More examples

TypeScript usage

puppeteer-extra and most plugins are written in TS, so you get perfect type support out of the box. :)

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-extra'

import AdblockerPlugin from 'puppeteer-extra-plugin-adblocker'
import StealthPlugin from 'puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth'

puppeteer.use(AdblockerPlugin()).use(StealthPlugin())

puppeteer
  .launch({ headless: false, defaultViewport: null })
  .then(async browser => {
    const page = await browser.newPage()
    await page.goto('https://bot.sannysoft.com')
    await page.waitForTimeout(5000)
    await page.screenshot({ path: 'stealth.png', fullPage: true })
    await browser.close()
  })

Please check this wiki entry in case you have TypeScript related import issues.

Playwright usage

playright-extra with plugin support is available as well.

Multiple puppeteers with different plugins

const vanillaPuppeteer = require('puppeteer')

const { addExtra } = require('puppeteer-extra')
const AnonymizeUA = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-anonymize-ua')

async function main() {
  const pptr1 = addExtra(vanillaPuppeteer)
  pptr1.use(
    AnonymizeUA({
      customFn: ua => 'Hello1/' + ua.replace('Chrome', 'Beer')
    })
  )

  const pptr2 = addExtra(vanillaPuppeteer)
  pptr2.use(
    AnonymizeUA({
      customFn: ua => 'Hello2/' + ua.replace('Chrome', 'Beer')
    })
  )

  await checkUserAgent(pptr1)
  await checkUserAgent(pptr2)
}

main()

async function checkUserAgent(pptr) {
  const browser = await pptr.launch({ headless: true })
  const page = await browser.newPage()
  await page.goto('https://httpbin.org/headers', {
    waitUntil: 'domcontentloaded'
  })
  const content = await page.content()
  console.log(content)
  await browser.close()
}

Using with puppeteer-cluster

puppeteer-cluster allows you to create a cluster of puppeteer workers and plays well together with puppeteer-extra.

const { Cluster } = require('puppeteer-cluster')
const vanillaPuppeteer = require('puppeteer')

const { addExtra } = require('puppeteer-extra')
const Stealth = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth')
const Recaptcha = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-recaptcha')

async function main() {
  // Create a custom puppeteer-extra instance using `addExtra`,
  // so we could create additional ones with different plugin config.
  const puppeteer = addExtra(vanillaPuppeteer)
  puppeteer.use(Stealth())
  puppeteer.use(Recaptcha())

  // Launch cluster with puppeteer-extra
  const cluster = await Cluster.launch({
    puppeteer,
    maxConcurrency: 2,
    concurrency: Cluster.CONCURRENCY_CONTEXT
  })

  // Define task handler
  await cluster.task(async ({ page, data: url }) => {
    await page.goto(url)

    const { hostname } = new URL(url)
    const { captchas } = await page.findRecaptchas()
    console.log(`Found ${captchas.length} captcha on ${hostname}`)

    await page.screenshot({ path: `${hostname}.png`, fullPage: true })
  })

  // Queue any number of tasks
  cluster.queue('https://bot.sannysoft.com')
  cluster.queue('https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo')
  cluster.queue('http://www.wikipedia.org/')

  await cluster.idle()
  await cluster.close()
  console.log(`All done, check the screenshots. ✨`)
}

// Let's go
main().catch(console.warn)

For using with TypeScript, just change your imports to:

import { Cluster } from 'puppeteer-cluster'
import vanillaPuppeteer from 'puppeteer'

import { addExtra } from 'puppeteer-extra'
import Stealth from 'puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth'
import Recaptcha from 'puppeteer-extra-plugin-recaptcha'

Using with chrome-aws-lambda

If you plan to use chrome-aws-lambda with the stealth plugin, you'll need to modify the default args to remove the --disable-notifications flag to pass all the tests.

const chromium = require('chrome-aws-lambda')
const { addExtra } = require('puppeteer-extra')
const puppeteerExtra = addExtra(chromium.puppeteer)

const launch = async () => {
  puppeteerExtra
    .launch({
      args: chromium.args,
      defaultViewport: chromium.defaultViewport,
      executablePath: await chromium.executablePath,
      headless: chromium.headless
    })
    .then(async browser => {
      const page = await browser.newPage()
      await page.goto('https://www.spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm')
      await page.waitForTimeout(10 * 1000)
      await browser.close()
    })
}

launch() // Launch Browser

Using with Kikobeats/browserless

Kikobeats/browserless is a puppeteer-like Node.js library for interacting with Headless production scenarios.

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra')
const StealthPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth')
puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin())

const browserless = require('browserless')({ puppeteer })

const saveBufferToFile = (buffer, fileName) => {
  const wstream = require('fs').createWriteStream(fileName)
  wstream.write(buffer)
  wstream.end()
}

browserless
  .screenshot('https://bot.sannysoft.com', { device: 'iPhone 6' })
  .then(buffer => {
    const fileName = 'screenshot.png'
    saveBufferToFile(buffer, fileName)
    console.log(`your screenshot is here: `, fileName)
  })

---

Plugins

🔥 puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth

• Applies various evasion techniques to make detection of puppeteer harder.

🏴 puppeteer-extra-plugin-recaptcha

• Solves reCAPTCHAs and hCaptchas automatically, using a single line of code: page.solveRecaptchas().

puppeteer-extra-plugin-adblocker

• Very fast & efficient blocker for ads and trackers. Reduces bandwidth & load times.

puppeteer-extra-plugin-devtools

• Makes puppeteer browser debugging possible from anywhere.
• Creates a secure tunnel to make the devtools frontend (incl. screencasting) accessible from the public internet

puppeteer-extra-plugin-repl

• Makes quick puppeteer debugging and exploration fun with an interactive REPL.

puppeteer-extra-plugin-block-resources

• Blocks resources (images, media, css, etc.) in puppeteer.
• Supports all resource types, blocking can be toggled dynamically.

puppeteer-extra-plugin-flash

• Allows flash content to run on all sites without user interaction.

puppeteer-extra-plugin-anonymize-ua

• Anonymizes the user-agent on all pages.
• Supports dynamic replacing, so the browser version stays intact and recent.

puppeteer-extra-plugin-user-preferences

• Allows setting custom Chrome/Chromium user preferences.
• Has itself a plugin interface which is used by e.g. puppeteer-extra-plugin-font-size.

Check out the packages folder for more plugins.

Community Plugins

These plugins have been generously contributed by members of the community. Please note that they're hosted outside the main project and not under our control or supervision.

puppeteer-extra-plugin-minmax

• Minimize and maximize puppeteer in real time.
• Great for manually solving captchas.

puppeteer-extra-plugin-portal

• Use the Chromium screencast API to remotely view and interact with puppeteer sessions.
• Great for remotely intervening when an automated task gets stuck, like captchas.

Please check the Contributing section below if you're interested in creating a plugin as well.

---

Contributors

Further info

Contributing

PRs and new plugins are welcome! 🎉 The plugin API for puppeteer-extra is clean and fun to use. Have a look the PuppeteerExtraPlugin base class documentation to get going and check out the existing plugins (minimal example is the anonymize-ua plugin) for reference.

We use a monorepo powered by Lerna (and yarn workspaces), ava for testing, TypeScript for the core, the standard style for linting and JSDoc heavily to auto-generate markdown documentation based on code. :-)

Kudos

• Thanks to skyiea for this PR that started the project idea.
• Thanks to transitive-bullshit for suggesting a modular plugin design, which was fun to implement.

Compatibility

puppeteer-extra and all plugins are tested continously in a matrix of current (stable & LTS) NodeJS and puppeteer versions. We never broke compatibility and still support puppeteer down to very early versions from 2018.

A few plugins won't work in headless mode (it's noted if that's the case) due to Chrome limitations (e.g. the user-preferences plugin), look into xvfb-run if you still require a headless experience in these circumstances.

Changelog

2.1.6 ➠ 3.1.1

2.1.6 ➠ 3.1.1

Big refactor, the core is now written in TypeScript 🎉 That means out of the box type safety for fellow TS users and nice auto-completion in VSCode for JS users. Also:

• A new addExtra export, to patch any puppeteer compatible library with plugin functionality (chrome-aws-lambda, etc). This also allows for multiple puppeteer instances with different plugins.

The API is backwards compatible, I bumped the major version just in case I missed something. Please report any issues you might find with the new release. :)

---

API

Table of Contents

• class: PuppeteerExtra
  • .use(plugin)
  • .launch(options?)
  • .connect(options?)
  • .defaultArgs(options?)
  • .executablePath()
  • .createBrowserFetcher(options?)
  • .plugins
  • .getPluginData(name?)
• defaultExport()
• addExtra(puppeteer)

class: PuppeteerExtra

Modular plugin framework to teach puppeteer new tricks.

This module acts as a drop-in replacement for puppeteer.

Allows PuppeteerExtraPlugin's to register themselves and to extend puppeteer with additional functionality.

Example:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra')
puppeteer.use(require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-anonymize-ua')())
puppeteer.use(
  require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-font-size')({ defaultFontSize: 18 })
)
;(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: false })
  const page = await browser.newPage()
  await page.goto('http://example.com', { waitUntil: 'domcontentloaded' })
  await browser.close()
})()

---

.use(plugin)

• plugin PuppeteerExtraPlugin

Returns: this The same PuppeteerExtra instance (for optional chaining)

The main interface to register puppeteer-extra plugins.

Example:

puppeteer.use(plugin1).use(plugin2)

• See: PuppeteerExtraPlugin

---

.launch(options?)

• options Puppeteer.LaunchOptions? See puppeteer docs.

Returns: Promise<Puppeteer.Browser>

The method launches a browser instance with given arguments. The browser will be closed when the parent node.js process is closed.

Augments the original puppeteer.launch method with plugin lifecycle methods.

All registered plugins that have a beforeLaunch method will be called in sequence to potentially update the options Object before launching the browser.

Example:

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
  headless: false,
  defaultViewport: null
})

---

.connect(options?)

• options Puppeteer.ConnectOptions? See puppeteer docs.

Returns: Promise<Puppeteer.Browser>

Attach Puppeteer to an existing Chromium instance.

Augments the original puppeteer.connect method with plugin lifecycle methods.

All registered plugins that have a beforeConnect method will be called in sequence to potentially update the options Object before launching the browser.

---

.defaultArgs(options?)

• options Puppeteer.ChromeArgOptions? See puppeteer docs.

Returns: Array<string>

The default flags that Chromium will be launched with.

---

.executablePath()

Returns: string

Path where Puppeteer expects to find bundled Chromium.

---

.createBrowserFetcher(options?)

• options Puppeteer.FetcherOptions? See puppeteer docs.

Returns: Puppeteer.BrowserFetcher

This methods attaches Puppeteer to an existing Chromium instance.

---

.plugins

Type: Array<PuppeteerExtraPlugin>

Get a list of all registered plugins.

---

.getPluginData(name?)

• name string? Filter data by optional plugin name

Collects the exposed data property of all registered plugins. Will be reduced/flattened to a single array.

Can be accessed by plugins that listed the dataFromPlugins requirement.

Implemented mainly for plugins that need data from other plugins (e.g. user-preferences).

• See: PuppeteerExtraPlugin/data

---

defaultExport()

Type: PuppeteerExtra

The default export will behave exactly the same as the regular puppeteer (just with extra plugin functionality) and can be used as a drop-in replacement.

Behind the scenes it will try to require either puppeteer or puppeteer-core from the installed dependencies.

Example:

// javascript import
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra')

// typescript/es6 module import
import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-extra'

// Add plugins
puppeteer.use(...)

---

addExtra(puppeteer)

• puppeteer VanillaPuppeteer Any puppeteer API-compatible puppeteer implementation or version.

Returns: PuppeteerExtra A fresh PuppeteerExtra instance using the provided puppeteer

An alternative way to use puppeteer-extra: Augments the provided puppeteer with extra plugin functionality.

This is useful in case you need multiple puppeteer instances with different plugins or to add plugins to a non-standard puppeteer package.

Example:

// js import
const puppeteerVanilla = require('puppeteer')
const { addExtra } = require('puppeteer-extra')

// ts/es6 import
import puppeteerVanilla from 'puppeteer'
import { addExtra } from 'puppeteer-extra'

// Patch provided puppeteer and add plugins
const puppeteer = addExtra(puppeteerVanilla)
puppeteer.use(...)

---

License

Copyright © 2018 - 2023, berstend̡̲̫̹̠̖͚͓̔̄̓̐̄͛̀͘. Released under the MIT License.