How to run Puppeteer on ARM based Infrastructure

Hello,

For years now I’ve been using Phantom.js for some server-side browsing feature. For 2 mains reason it recently leads me to find a replacement**:**

• I am now on a ARM based infrastructure and the binary I was using was no longer working
• Phantom.js project is no longer under development as far as I know

So recently I’ve run through this on Twitter

Puppeteer v2.1.0 is out! 🔥

➡️ Chromium 80
➡️ puppeteer.launch({product: ‘firefox’})

Puppeteer can now talk to a real, unpatched Firefox binary. You no longer need to install puppeteer-firefox separately pic.twitter.com/Kw5UZ35gHo

— Mathias Bynens (@mathias) January 28, 2020

When it came to find a replacement for Phantom.js I thought about this.

How to

puppeteer/puppeteer

1. Create your Node.js Project with puppeteer as dependency

yarn add puppeteer or npm i install puppeteer

2. For a debian based distribution install chromium

apt-get install chromium

3. Get chromium binary location

which chromium you’ll get /usr/bin/chromium

4. Just reference that binary for puppeteer just as suggested on Mathias Bynens’s Tweet above

You can have an overview of issue for running puppeteer on a arm based environment from Github issue there:

raspberry pi Chromium revision is not downloaded · Issue #550 · puppeteer/puppeteer

If you are not referencing chromium on arm based infrastructure you’ll get errors

That’s all for today, enjoy.