james-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 (using Xvfb or with PhantomJS) and set the proxy configuration on the fly.

At the beginning of time, there was substack/browser-launcher, and all was well with the world. However, life happened, and the project became unmaintained. Out of the ashes, a leader emerged, and promised the citizens of npm that browser-launcher would become great again, but under a new banner: browser-launcher2. The world was once again prosperous, until we were eventually notified that the king had forsaken us (which happens, it's open source, and benderjs did a lot for the community, which is awesome!)

Anyways, due to the project's dependence on browser-launcher2, james-proxy forked the project to make some much-needed updates and fix some problems.

Differences from browser-launcher

• contains fixes and pull requests for unresolved issues reported in original repository
• launcher.browsers is an array of local browsers only, not an object as it was before
• launch callback returns an Instance instead of a child process, see API section for more details
• uses win-detect-browsers for browser detection on Windows
• more browsers supported

Differences from browser-launcher2

• This repository is not dead
• See CHANGELOG.md

Supported browsers

The goal for this module is to support all major browsers on every desktop platform.

At the moment, james-browser-launcher supports following browsers on Windows, Unix and OS X:

• Chrome
• Chromium
• Firefox
• IE (Windows only)
• Opera
• Safari
• PhantomJS

Install

npm install @james-proxy/james-browser-launcher

Example

Browser launch

var launcher = require( '@james-proxy/james-browser-launcher' );

launcher( function( err, launch ) {
	if ( err ) {
		return console.error( err );
	}

	launch( 'http://cksource.com/', 'chrome', function( err, instance ) {
		if ( err ) {
			return console.error( err );
		}

		console.log( 'Instance started with PID:', instance.pid );

		instance.on( 'stop', function( code ) {
			console.log( 'Instance stopped with exit code:', code );
		} );
	} );
} );

Outputs:

$ node example/launch.js
Instance started with PID: 12345
Instance stopped with exit code: 0

Browser launch with options

var launcher = require( '@james-proxy/james-browser-launcher' );

launcher( function( err, launch ) {
	// ...
	launch(
		'http://cksource.com/',
		{
			browser: 'chrome',
			noProxy: [ '127.0.0.1', 'localhost' ],
			options: [
				'--disable-web-security',
				'--disable-extensions'
			]
		},
		function( err, instance ) {
			// ...
		}
	);
} );

Browser detection

var launcher = require( '../' );

launcher.detect( function( available ) {
	console.log( 'Available browsers:' );
	console.dir( available );
} );

Outputs:

$ node example/detect.js
Available browsers:
[ { name: 'chrome',
		version: '36.0.1985.125',
		type: 'chrome',
		command: 'google-chrome' },
	{ name: 'chromium',
		version: '36.0.1985.125',
		type: 'chrome',
		command: 'chromium-browser' },
	{ name: 'firefox',
		version: '31.0',
		type: 'firefox',
		command: 'firefox' },
	{ name: 'phantomjs',
		version: '1.9.7',
		type: 'phantom',
		command: 'phantomjs' },
	{ name: 'opera',
		version: '12.16',
		type: 'opera',
		command: 'opera' } ]

Detaching the launched browser process from your script

If you want the opened browser to remain open after killing your script, first, you need to set options.detached to true (see the API). By default, killing your script will kill the opened browsers.

Then, if you want your script to immediately return control to the shell, you may additionally call unref on the instance object in the callback:

var launcher = require('@james-proxy/james-browser-launcher');
launcher( function (err, launch) {
	launch( 'http://example.org/', {
		browser: 'chrome',
		detached: true
    }, function( err, instance ) {
		if ( err ) {
			return console.error( err );
		}

		instance.process.unref();
		instance.process.stdin.unref();
		instance.process.stdout.unref();
		instance.process.stderr.unref();
	} );
});

API

var launcher = require('@james-proxy/james-browser-launcher');

launcher([configPath], callback)

Detect available browsers and pass launch function to the callback.

Parameters:

• String configPath - path to a browser configuration file (Optional)
• Function callback(err, launch) - function called with launch function and errors (if any)

launch(uri, options, callback)

Open given URI in a browser and return an instance of it.

Parameters:

• String uri - URI to open in a newly started browser
• Object|String options - configuration options or name of a browser to launch
• String options.browser - name of a browser to launch
• String options.version - version of a browser to launch, if none was given, the highest available version will be launched
• String options.proxy - URI of the proxy server
• Array options.options - additional command line options
• Boolean options.skipDefaults - don't supply any default options to browser
• Boolean options.detached - if true, then killing your script will not kill the opened browser
• Array|String options.noProxy - An array of strings, containing proxy routes to skip over
• Boolean options.headless - run a browser in a headless mode (only if Xvfb available)
• String options.profile - path to a directory to use for the browser profile, overriding the default
• Function callback(err, instance) - function fired when started a browser instance or an error occurred

launch.browsers

This property contains an array of all known and available browsers.

instance

Browser instance object.

Properties:

• String command - command used to start the instance
• Array args - array of command line arguments used while starting the instance
• String image - instance's image name
• String processName - instance's process name
• Object process - reference to instance's process started with Node's child_process.spawn API
• Number pid - instance's process PID
• Stream stdout - instance's process STDOUT stream
• Stream stderr - instance's process STDERR stream

Events:

• stop - fired when instance stops

Methods:

• stop(callback) - stop the instance and fire the callback once stopped

launcher.detect(callback)

Detects all browsers available.

Parameters:

• Function callback(available) - function called with array of all recognized browsers

Each browser contains following properties:

• name - name of a browser
• version - browser's version
• type - type of a browser i.e. browser's family
• command - command used to launch a browser

launcher.update([configFile], callback)

Updates the browsers cache file (~/.config/james-browser-launcher/config.json is no configFile was given) and creates new profiles for found browsers.

Parameters:

• String configFile - path to the configuration file Optional
• Function callback(err, browsers) - function called with found browsers and errors (if any)

Known Issues

• IE8: after several starts and stops, if you manually open IE it will come up with a pop-up asking if we want to restore tabs (#21)
• Chrome @ OSX: it's not possible to launch multiple instances of Chrome at once

License

MIT