It will launch an existing browser installation. If you like, you can opt for the API-only download called puppeteer-core. Expect to download between 170MB and 282MB, depending on your O/S. Along with the Puppeteer API, you’ll get the most recent version of Chromium thrown in for free! Yes, it’s already free, but this particular installation is guaranteed to work with the API. You can install Puppeteer using Yarn or npm. In today’s article, we’ll be using the Puppeteer, which is a Node library of high-level APIs to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol, to search for the above article on and download a screenshot of it.

This might include logging in and out of sites, saving session information between page navigations, and interacting with page elements such as links, buttons, and most other form controls. Having a browser engine at your disposal allows you to do just about anything that you can do yourself. It should be noted that similar tools, known as headless browsers, have opened up a world of possibilities that go far beyond Web Scraping. Reading JavaScript output required the use of a browser automation engine called the Selenium WebDriver.

I recently wrote an article on Web Scraping JavaScript Rendered Content. Not to be deterred, many companies harvest content from other sites using a process called Web Scraping. Unfortunately, the reality is that most sites are meant to be read directly by a person via a browser. In a perfect world, websites would make their content available via RSS, Atom feed, or some other easily digested format.

Download free puppeteer npm