Getting Started with the Puppeteer Framework

Learn to programmatically control Chrome browsers for UI testing, performance monitoring, and traffic analysis with Google Puppeteer.

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Puppeteer is an open-source node library and framework developed by Google that is based on the CDP. It allows web application developers to control headless or headed Chrome browsers through high-level APIs over the above-mentioned CDP or DevTools protocol. Puppeteer and Playwright share the same architecture and CDP to create and run tests.

Unlike Selenium and Cypress, Puppeteer only supports Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, which means that testing end-to-end across all other browsers, such as WebKit Safari and Mozilla Firefox, isn’t supported.

Core capabilities of Puppeteer

Below are the core capabilities of Puppeteer:

  • Generating screenshots and PDFs of website pages

  • Crawling single-page applications

  • Generating prerendered content

  • Automating form submissions

  • Conducting UI testing

  • Simulating user gestures, such as keyboard inputs

  • Testing Chrome extensions with CDP support

  • Capturing a timeline trace of the site for performance monitoring

Generating a website HAR file with Puppeteer

A website HAR file can be easily generated using Puppeteer. Using a generated HAR file, we can review the entire traffic within the website and get performance and security insights for each of the transactions.

The following code snippet will navigate to the Packt website and generate a HAR file for review:

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