Puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol.

When to Use

• Chrome Specific: If testing cross-browser isn't a priority (or you only care about Chromium).
• Web Scraping: Excellent for scraping SPAs because it renders JS.
• PDF/Screenshots: The industry standard for "HTML to PDF" generation.

Quick Start

import puppeteer from "puppeteer";

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto("https://developer.chrome.com/");
  await page.pdf({ path: "dv.pdf", format: "A4" });

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

Core Concepts

DevTools Protocol (CDP)

Puppeteer talks directly to Chrome via CDP. This allows deeper control (intercepting network at a low level, CPU profiling) than WebDriver.

Headless by Default

Puppeteer launches Chrome in headless mode by default. Use headless: false to see it.

Best Practices (2025)

Do:

• Use page.waitForSelector: Before clicking or scraping.
• Use stealth plugins: If scraping, use puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth to avoid detection.
• Use Playwright: Consider switching. Playwright is maintained by the team that built Puppeteer (after moving to Microsoft) and has a better API.

Don't:

• Don't leak browsers: Always ensure browser.close() is called in a finally block or via a test runner hook.

References

• Puppeteer Documentation