Technically, the old Headless was a separate, alternate browser implementation that happened to be shipped as part of the same Chrome binary. Perhaps surprisingly, this wasn’t actually true. The command-line snippet we showed earlier uses the -headless command-line flag, suggesting that Headless is just a mode of operation of the regular Chrome browser. Here’s a minimal command-line example of using Headless mode to create a PDF file of a given URL: chrome -headless -print-to-pdf # What’s new in Headless?īefore we dive into the recent Headless improvements, it’s important to understand how the “old” Headless worked. Headless mode is a popular choice for browser automation through projects like Puppeteer or ChromeDriver. Essentially, running Chrome without chrome! # Backgroundīack in 2017, Chrome 59 introduced the so-called Headless mode, which lets you run the browser in an unattended environment without any visible UI. puppeteerrc.cjs (or ’s Headless mode just got a whole lot better! This article presents an overview of recent engineering efforts to make Headless more useful for developers by bringing Headless closer to Chrome’s regular “headful” mode. Puppeteer uses several defaults that can be customized through configurationįor example, to change the default cache directory Puppeteer uses to installīrowsers, you can add a. Include $HOME/.cache into the project's deployment.įor a version of Puppeteer without the browser installation, see Your project folder (see an example below) because not all hosting providers Heroku, you might need to reconfigure the location of the cache to be within If you deploy a project using Puppeteer to a hosting provider, such as Render or The browser is downloaded to the $HOME/.cache/puppeteer folderīy default (starting with Puppeteer v19.0.0). When you install Puppeteer, it automatically downloads a recent version ofĬhrome for Testing (~170MB macOS, ~282MB Linux, ~280MB Windows) that is guaranteed to

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