Docker Puppeteer Dev

A dockerized Puppeteer development environment, to work with the Headless Chrome Node API locally.

Read more here.

Getting Started

Make sure you have Docker and docker-compose installed and configured so your current user can use both.

Build and run the container:

$ make rebuild

Wait for the following lines

Creating dockerpuppeteerdev_puppeteer_1 ... done
Attaching to dockerpuppeteerdev_puppeteer_1

In another terminal session, enter the container:

$ make enter

Install puppeteer:

$ yarn install

Now you can run your code within the container:

$ node index.js

Next Steps

You can play around with puppeteer and try stuff out! Currently, the code simply fetches a website and saves a screenshot to the output folder.

As both code and output are mounted from the host, you can develop using your local editor, and see results you're producing. Changes to your code are available in the container right away. Upon a restart, you won't need to reinstall any dependencies.

Adding OS Packages

If you need other tools or libraries, you'll need to adjust the Dockerfile and rebuild the image. It won't clutter your local system and you can be certain that you can work with puppeteer on different OS flavors without finding out how to install dependencies there.

Adding Node Packages

Use yarn add package_name, which will persist the package into both package.json and yarn.lock between container restarts. Check out this part of the yarn docs for more details.

A Word of Caution

This setup, is meant only for development. Puppeteer starts Headless Chrome in complete disregard of security concerns for once. Also, you'll be running your code as root.

Links

• Puppeteer

• Getting started with Headless Chrome

• Using Yarn

• Discussion on the no-sandbox issue