How to install and use Puppeteer in Ubuntu

Working with Puppeteer for Data Scraping from websites in Node.Js is very easy. However it works easily on Windows but sometimes causes problem running on Linux (GUI less servers).

Recently I worked on a project in which integrated Puppeteer to scrap data. It worked fine on Windows (however I wrote my code on Windows machine). But when I deployed it to AWS EC2 Ubuntu 16.04 Cloud Server, it didn’t run. There was error something like Not able to start Chromium.

I invested my 2 days of time around it and the fix was pretty easy.

All you have to pass is --no-sandbox in the args while Puppeteer launch.

Steps are below:

1. Install Puppeteer

npm i puppeteer

2. Install 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

3. Now use below code

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

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

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

Conclusion

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. We learnt about how to install and use Puppeteer in Ubuntu.