Headless Chrome Node API and Puppeteer installation

Question

Throughout the process of installation chrome headless on a clean ubuntu 18.04 i faced quite a few issues. The setup guide on github is not sufficient for a clean ubuntu 18.04

The following are some errors and answer / solutions to setting up headless chrome an alternative to phantomjs.

Error 1

(node:23835) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: Chromium revision is not downloaded. Run "npm install" or "yarn install"
    at Launcher.launch owlcommand.com /puppeteer/node_modules/puppeteer/lib/Launcher.js:112:15)
    at <anonymous>
(node:23835) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection. This error originated either by throwing inside of an async function without a catch block, or by rejecting a promise which was not handled with .catch(). (rejection id: 1)
(node:23835) [DEP0018] DeprecationWarning: Unhandled promise rejections are deprecated. In the future, promise rejections that are not handled will terminate the Node.js process with a non-zero exit code.

Error 2

(node:25272) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: Failed to launch chrome!
owlcommand.com /puppeteer/node_modules/puppeteer/.local-chromium/linux-594312/chrome-linux/chrome: error while loading shared libraries: libX11-xcb.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Answer 1

Based on https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer

You only have to run the following command in Ubuntu 18.04

npm i puppeteer

Unfortunately this is not enough.

You will require the following Dependencies

sudo apt-get install gconf-service libasound2 libatk1.0-0 libatk-bridge2.0-0 libc6 libcairo2 libcups2 libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libgcc1 libgconf-2-4 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxi6 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxss1 libxtst6 ca-certificates fonts-liberation libappindicator1 libnss3 lsb-release xdg-utils wget

After which if you run it as per their example , you will receive an error

    (node:28469) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: Failed to launch chrome!
[1025/150325.817887:ERROR:zygote_host_impl_linux.cc(89)] Running as root without --no-sandbox is not supported. See https://crbug.com/638180.

The solution to this is

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({args: ['--no-sandbox']});

Adding --no-sandbox

It will work accordingly then. The full working source code is below

    const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({args: ['--no-sandbox']});
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('http://owlcommand.com');
  await page.screenshot({path: 'example.png'});

  await browser.close();
})();

Solution to [email protected]~install: cannot run in wd %s %s (wd=%s)

npm install --unsafe-perm

Screenshot Size

The default is really small, if the page you are testing is responsive, you can test it with different viewport settings. You can change its dimensions via the setViewport method.

await page.setViewport({
  width: 1600, 
  height: 1000
});

Update for Latest Puppeteer (Aug 2020)

sudo apt-get install libgbm1 (Required)