HOWTO: Local Development

This project is compiled specifically for AWS Lambda (Linux x64)

Therefore the binary might not be compatible with your local system, making development trickier.

Background

The headless getter returns a boolean indicating if we are running on a serverless environment.

If it returns false, it will cause the following side-effects:

• the args getter will return different flags
  • --single-process flag will be omitted
  • --start-maximized flag with be present
• the defaultViewport getter will return a different configuration
  • width=0 (maximized) instead of width=1920
  • height=0 (maximized) instead of height=1080
• the font() method becomes no-op to avoid polluting the user space
• the executablePath getter returns null and Chromium / SwiftShader will not be extracted

Environment Variables

It's possible to trick the headless getter into returning true by setting any of the following:

• AWS_LAMBDA_FUNCTION_NAME (used by AWS Lambda)
• FUNCTION_NAME (used by Google Cloud Functions)
• FUNCTION_TARGET (used by Google Cloud Functions)

Additionally, to use the bundled iltorb module, you need to be running Node 8.10 and set:

• AWS_EXECUTION_ENV=AWS_Lambda_nodejs8.10

Note that this approach is not recommended, as it may not be compatible with your system.

On Node v10.16.0+, native Brotli is used instead, so the bundled iltorb is no longer necessary.

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Workaround

The suggested workaround is to install puppeteer as a development dependency.

npm install puppeteer-core chrome-aws-lambda --save-prod
npm install puppeteer --save-dev

The provided puppeteer getter will return the resolved puppeteer package.

First it will try to load puppeteer and, only if that's not available, fallback to loading puppeteer-core - if puppeteer-code is also not available, then a MODULE_NOT_FOUND error is thrown.

As long as your deployment pipeline skips bundling devDependencies, this approach allows us to rely on puppeteer for local development and puppeteer-core for production deployments.