UNMAINTAINED: This repo is now unmaintained. We recommend using https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome/tree/master/packages/lambda instead.

joytocode/headless-chrome-builder

A script to build Headless Chrome at any release version.

Prebuilt stable Headless Chrome for AWS EC2 and Lambda

Version	Release Date
68.0.3440.84	July 31, 2018
68.0.3440.75	July 24, 2018
67.0.3396.99	June 25, 2018
67.0.3396.87	June 13, 2018
67.0.3396.79	June 6, 2018
67.0.3396.62	May 29, 2018
66.0.3359.181	May 15, 2018
66.0.3359.170	May 10, 2018
66.0.3359.139	April 26, 2018
66.0.3359.117	April 17, 2018

We track stable desktop releases by this blog https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20updates.

Build instructions

We tested the script on AWS only. You can still make it work on GCP or Azure with some small changes (or none).

We use the following setup:

• AMI: Amazon Linux AMI 2018.03.0 (HVM), SSD Volume Type - ami-0ad99772
• Instance type: c5.4xlarge (16 vCPUs, 32 GiB Memory) (c5.2xlarge still works but takes 20 minutes longer)
• Root storage: 30 GiB

The build will take about 45 minutes and cost $0.50 (On-Demand pricing of c5.4xlarge at US West is $0.68 per hour).

When the EC2 instance is ready, SSH to it and run commands in next sections.

If you want to run a long command in background, do it by nohup bash -c './builder.sh fetch' & or nohup bash -c './builder.sh build' &. Then, you can terminate and reconnect SSH anytime and also watch the log by tail -f -n 50 ./nohup.out.

1. Download the builder script

$ cd ~

$ wget https://rawgit.com/joytocode/headless-chrome-builder/master/builder.sh

$ chmod +x ./builder.sh

2. Fetch the source code (20 minutes)

$ ./builder.sh fetch

3. Sync the source code to a specific release tag

$ ./builder.sh sync RELEASE_TAG

Replace RELEASE_TAG with the tag you want to build, such as 66.0.3359.117.

If you see error like:

src/third_party/webrtc (ERROR)

Error: Command 'git checkout --quiet b20aef0d47bf3924adfc7bfbee707f6f137670fb' returned non-zero exit status 128 in /home/ec2-user/chromium/src/third_party/webrtc

fatal: reference is not a tree: b20aef0d47bf3924adfc7bfbee707f6f137670fb

Go to the submodule and fetch the required commit (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromium-dev/h7nWEEE4ank/U7OyeqGBAQAJ):

$ cd ~/chromium/src/third_party/webrtc

$ git fetch origin b20aef0d47bf3924adfc7bfbee707f6f137670fb

$ cd ~

Remember to replace the commit id with the one in the error message. Repeat running sync and fixing errors until you see no error.

4. Build the source code (20 minutes)

$ ./builder.sh build

When it finishes, you can find the output file at ~/chromium/src/out/headless/headless_shell.

Credits

• sambaiz/puppeteer-lambda-starter-kit: we inspire mostly from this project and also add tag handling
• adieuadieu/serverless-chrome: the first attempt to build Headless Chrome for Lambda
• Chromium documentation: linux_build_instructions and working-with-release-branches

License

MIT