browser-launcher

Detect the browser versions available on your system and launch them in an isolated profile for automated testing purposes.

You can launch browsers headlessly (if you have Xvfb or with phantom) and set the proxy configuration on the fly.

example

var launcher = require('launcher');
launcher(function (err, launch) {
    if (err) return console.error(err);
    
    console.log('# available browsers:');
    console.dir(launch.browsers);
    
    var opts = {
        headless : true,
        browser : 'chrome',
        proxy : 'localhost:7077',
    };
    launch('http://substack.net', opts, function (err, ps) {
        if (err) return console.error(err);
    });
});

---

$ node example/launch.js 
# available browsers:
{ local: 
   [ { name: 'chrome',
       re: {},
       type: 'chrome',
       profile: '/home/substack/.config/browser-launcher/chrome-17.0.963.12_9c0bdd8d',
       command: 'google-chrome',
       version: '17.0.963.12' },
     { name: 'chromium',
       re: {},
       type: 'chrome',
       profile: '/home/substack/.config/browser-launcher/chromium-18.0.1025.168_e025d855',
       command: 'chromium-browser',
       version: '18.0.1025.168' },
     { name: 'phantom',
       re: {},
       type: 'phantom',
       headless: true,
       profile: '/home/substack/.config/browser-launcher/phantom-1.4.0_31767fa2',
       command: 'phantomjs',
       version: '1.4.0' },
     { name: 'firefox',
       re: {},
       type: 'firefox',
       profile: [Object],
       command: 'firefox',
       version: '12.0' } ] }

methods

var launcher = require('launcher')

launcher(cb)

Create a new launcher function in cb(err, launch), scanning for system browsers if no ~/.config/browser-launcher/config.json is present and reading from that file otherwise.

launch(uri, opts, cb)

Launch a new instance of opts.browser with the optional version constraint opts.version. Without an opts.version, the highest version of opts.browser is used.

To launch the browser headlessly (if it isn't already headless like phantom), set opts.headless. This launches the browser with node-headless which uses the Xvfb command to create a fake X server.

To use the browser with a proxy, set opts.proxy as a colon-separated 'host:port' string.

Set proxy routes to skip over with opts.noProxy.

You can pass additional options directly through to the browser commands with opts.options.

cb fires with cb(err, ps) where ps is the process object created with spawn().

launch.browsers

This property shows what browsers are configured to be launchable, divided into groups. The default group is 'local'.

install

npm install browser-launcher

license

MIT