In fact, it can all be done in a headless mode. Most importantly, Puppeteer doesn’t require a running GUI. You can test your UI on different device simulations and take screenshots.

Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the Chrome DevTools Protocol. You can use the Puppeteer library to use Headless Chrome with Node.js. This library uses WebSocket or a system pipe-based protocol over a Chrome DevTools interface, which can take screenshots, and measure page load metrics, connection speeds, downloaded content size, and more. Node.js is the main language interface used by the Google Chrome development team, and it has an almost native integrated library for communicating with Chrome called Puppeteer. Headless Chrome inside a Docker container.In this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how to create a Dockerfile to set up a Headless Chrome browser in Node.js. It has become increasingly critical to have a Docker container-based headless browser to maximize flexibility and scalability. Running a GUI is more expensive than spinning up a Linux-based server or scaling a simple Docker container across a microservices cluster, such as Kubernetes.īut I digress. There are also countless use cases for website crawlers and HTML-based content analysis.įor 99 percent of these cases, you don’t need a browser GUI because it is fully automated. Headless browsers have become very popular with the rise of automated UI tests in the application development process. To learn more about Docker, visit our archives here. Software scalability expert! Setting up a Headless Chrome Node.js server in DockerĮditor’s note: This guide to setting up a Headless Chrome Node.js server in Docker was last updated on 9 January 2023 to update any outdated code, further explain the breakdown of the Dockerfile steps, and include more interactive code examples.

Tigran Bayburtsyan Follow Cofounder and CTO at Hexact, Inc.

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