Puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome or Chromium.

Use Cases

• Generate screenshots and PDFs of pages.
• Crawl a SPA and generate pre-rendered content (i.e. “SSR”).
• 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.

Usage

Caution: Puppeteer requires at least Node v6.4.0, but the 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 https://example.com and saving a screenshot as example.png:

Save file as example.js

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();
})();

Why is the Chrome team building Puppeteer?

• 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 features…and catch bugs!
• Learn more about the pain points of automated browser testing and help fill those gaps.