What is puppeteer?
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It is primarily used for automating web browser actions, such as taking screenshots, generating pre-rendered content, and automating form submissions, among other things.
What are puppeteer's main functionalities?
Web Scraping
Puppeteer can be used to scrape content from web pages by programmatically navigating to the page and extracting the required data.
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
const data = await page.evaluate(() => document.querySelector('*').outerHTML);
console.log(data);
await browser.close();
})();
Automated Testing
Puppeteer can automate form submissions and simulate user actions for testing web applications.
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com/login');
await page.type('#username', 'user');
await page.type('#password', 'pass');
await page.click('#submit');
// Check for successful login
await page.waitForSelector('#logout');
await browser.close();
})();
PDF Generation
Puppeteer can generate PDFs from web pages, which is useful for creating reports, invoices, and other printable documents.
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com', {waitUntil: 'networkidle2'});
await page.pdf({path: 'example.pdf', format: 'A4'});
await browser.close();
})();
Screenshot Capture
Puppeteer can take screenshots of web pages, either of the full page or specific elements, which is useful for capturing the state of a page for documentation or testing.
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
await page.screenshot({path: 'example.png'});
await browser.close();
})();
Other packages similar to puppeteer
playwright
Playwright is a Node library to automate the Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox browsers with a single API. It is similar to Puppeteer but adds support for multiple browser types and has additional features like network interception.
selenium-webdriver
Selenium WebDriver is one of the most well-known browser automation tools. It supports multiple browsers and languages, making it more versatile than Puppeteer, but it can be more complex to set up and slower in execution.
nightmare
Nightmare is a high-level browser automation library. It is simpler and has a more fluent API compared to Puppeteer, but it is less actively maintained and lacks some of the newer features that Puppeteer provides.
webdriverio
WebdriverIO is a custom implementation for selenium's W3C webdriver API. It is designed to be more accessible than the Selenium WebDriver and integrates well with modern web and mobile application testing practices.
Puppeteer
Puppeteer is a Node.js library which provides a high-level API to control
Chrome/Chromium over the
DevTools Protocol.
Puppeteer runs in
headless
mode by default, but can be configured to run in full ("headful")
Chrome/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 automated testing environment using the latest JavaScript and
browser features.
- Capture a
timeline trace
of your site to help diagnose performance issues.
- Test Chrome Extensions.
Getting Started
Installation
To use Puppeteer in your project, run:
npm i puppeteer
yarn add puppeteer
pnpm i puppeteer
When you install Puppeteer, it automatically downloads a recent version of
Chrome for Testing (~170MB macOS, ~282MB Linux, ~280MB Windows) and a chrome-headless-shell
binary (starting with Puppeteer v21.6.0) that is guaranteed to
work
with Puppeteer. The browser is downloaded to the $HOME/.cache/puppeteer
folder
by default (starting with Puppeteer v19.0.0). See configuration for configuration options and environmental variables to control the download behavor.
If you deploy a project using Puppeteer to a hosting provider, such as Render or
Heroku, you might need to reconfigure the location of the cache to be within
your project folder (see an example below) because not all hosting providers
include $HOME/.cache
into the project's deployment.
For a version of Puppeteer without the browser installation, see
puppeteer-core
.
If used with TypeScript, the minimum supported TypeScript version is 4.7.4
.
Configuration
Puppeteer uses several defaults that can be customized through configuration
files.
For example, to change the default cache directory Puppeteer uses to install
browsers, you can add a .puppeteerrc.cjs
(or puppeteer.config.cjs
) at the
root of your application with the contents
const {join} = require('path');
module.exports = {
cacheDirectory: join(__dirname, '.cache', 'puppeteer'),
};
After adding the configuration file, you will need to remove and reinstall
puppeteer
for it to take effect.
See the configuration guide for more
information.
puppeteer-core
For every release since v1.7.0 we publish two packages:
puppeteer
is a product for browser automation. When installed, it downloads
a version of Chrome, which it then drives using puppeteer-core
. Being an
end-user product, puppeteer
automates several workflows using reasonable
defaults that can be customized.
puppeteer-core
is a library to help drive anything that supports DevTools
protocol. Being a library, puppeteer-core
is fully driven through its
programmatic interface implying no defaults are assumed and puppeteer-core
will not download Chrome when installed.
You should use puppeteer-core
if you are
connecting to a remote browser
or managing browsers yourself.
If you are managing browsers yourself, you will need to call
puppeteer.launch
with
an explicit
executablePath
(or channel
if it's
installed in a standard location).
When using puppeteer-core
, remember to change the import:
import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';
Usage
Puppeteer follows the latest
maintenance LTS version of
Node.
Puppeteer will be familiar to people using other browser testing frameworks. You
launch/connect
a browser,
create some
pages, and then manipulate them with
Puppeteer's API.
For more in-depth usage, check our guides
and examples.
Example
The following example searches developer.chrome.com for blog posts with text "automate beyond recorder", click on the first result and print the full title of the blog post.
import puppeteer from 'puppeteer';
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://developer.chrome.com/');
await page.setViewport({width: 1080, height: 1024});
await page.type('.devsite-search-field', 'automate beyond recorder');
const searchResultSelector = '.devsite-result-item-link';
await page.waitForSelector(searchResultSelector);
await page.click(searchResultSelector);
const textSelector = await page.waitForSelector(
'text/Customize and automate'
);
const fullTitle = await textSelector?.evaluate(el => el.textContent);
console.log('The title of this blog post is "%s".', fullTitle);
await browser.close();
})();
Default runtime settings
1. Uses Headless mode
By default Puppeteer launches Chrome in
the Headless mode.
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({headless: true});
Before v22, Puppeteer launched the old Headless mode by default.
The old headless mode is now known as
chrome-headless-shell
and ships as a separate binary. chrome-headless-shell
does not match the
behavior of the regular Chrome completely but it is currently more performant
for automation tasks where the complete Chrome feature set is not needed. If the performance
is more important for your use case, switch to chrome-headless-shell
as following:
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({headless: 'shell'});
To launch a "headful" version of Chrome, set the
headless
to false
option when launching a browser:
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({headless: false});
2. Runs a bundled version of Chrome
By default, Puppeteer downloads and uses a specific version of Chrome 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 puppeteer.launch({executablePath: '/path/to/Chrome'});
You can also use Puppeteer with Firefox. See
status of cross-browser support 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.
Using Docker
See our Docker guide.
Using Chrome Extensions
See our Chrome extensions guide.
Resources
Contributing
Check out our contributing guide to get an
overview of Puppeteer development.
FAQ
Our FAQ has migrated to
our site.