Table of contents
What is Puppeteer?
On this page
We recommend using Playwright Test if you are just starting out with e2e testing and if you’re considering migrating from Puppeteer to Playwright use puppeteer-to-playwright.
Straight from the official documentation:
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. Puppeteer runs headless by default, but can be configured to run full (non-headless) Chrome or Chromium.
Let’s break that down:
- node library: Node.js and Javascript are the backbone of most web applications and will be familiar to most developers already
- high-level API: a human-readable interface for interacting with webpages through the browser (Chrome or Chromium) using…
- …the DevTools Protocol: the standard protocol used to expose Chrome functionality up to various development-oriented tools
- headless: running without a graphical user interface.
It is worth noting that Puppeteer is an open-source project maintained by the Chrome DevTools team. Find out how you can contribute to it!
Main use cases
We now know what Puppeteer is. The next question is “what can we use it for?”
- Test automation in modern web applications: verifying that the features we are exposing our users/customers to are actually behaving as expected.
- Taking screenshots of web pages: useful for a variety of different uses going from simple archiving to automated comparison for e.g. visual testing.
- Scraping web sites for data: extracting data from websites for later retrieval or analysis.
- Automating interaction of web pages: speed up and scale any sort of sequence of actions we would like to perform on a website automatically.
In this guide we will be looking at all these different use cases.
Philosophy and goals
- It currently supports mainly Chrome, but also Firefox nightly - support for more browsers might happen in the future. Still, Puppeteer is not a cross-browser testing tool. Its main focus is on Chrome and being fast and powerful.
- Like for the Chromium project, the focus is on speed, security, stability and simplicity. Expect these four things to be prioritised when a tradeoff is on the horizon.
- Chromium is bundled together with Puppeteer to minimise incompatibilities. This means every Puppeteer version has a specific Chromium version it supports.