puppeteer
Advanced tools
Package description
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.
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();
})();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 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 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 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.
Readme
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.
Most things that you can do manually in the browser can be done using Puppeteer! Here are a few examples to get you started:
To use Puppeteer in your project, run:
npm i puppeteer
# or using yarn
yarn add puppeteer
# or using pnpm
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.
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');
/**
* @type {import("puppeteer").Configuration}
*/
module.exports = {
// Changes the cache location for Puppeteer.
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-coreFor 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';
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.
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 () => {
// Launch the browser and open a new blank page
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
// Navigate the page to a URL
await page.goto('https://developer.chrome.com/');
// Set screen size
await page.setViewport({width: 1080, height: 1024});
// Type into search box
await page.type('.devsite-search-field', 'automate beyond recorder');
// Wait and click on first result
const searchResultSelector = '.devsite-result-item-link';
await page.waitForSelector(searchResultSelector);
await page.click(searchResultSelector);
// Locate the full title with a unique string
const textSelector = await page.waitForSelector(
'text/Customize and automate'
);
const fullTitle = await textSelector?.evaluate(el => el.textContent);
// Print the full title
console.log('The title of this blog post is "%s".', fullTitle);
await browser.close();
})();
1. Uses Headless mode
By default Puppeteer launches Chrome in the Headless mode.
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
// Equivalent to
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.
See our Docker guide.
See our Chrome extensions guide.
Check out our contributing guide to get an overview of Puppeteer development.
FAQs
A high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol
We found that puppeteer demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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