node-chromium

Fork of node-chromium, install selected version of Chromium.

node-chromium allows you to easily add Chromium binaries to your project and use it for automation, testing, web scraping or just for fun.

Why Chromium?

Chromium is an open-source web browser developed and maintained by The Chromium Project. Google Chrome, also released in 2008, is a proprietary web browser developed and maintained by Google. The reason why Chrome and Chromium are tied to each other is that Chome borrows Chromium’s source code.
The main benefit of using Chromium is that it doesn't include all the proprietary modifications made by Google, thus it's more lightweight and more suitable for automation purposes.
You can see full list of differences in Fossbytes article.

Requirements

node-chromium 2.x.x is tested against and supports Node.js 7+
If you need to use older versions of Node.js try node-chromium 1.x.x releases.

Usage

Depending on your needs, you can install module into devDependencies (--save-dev) or production dependencies (--save)

npm install --save @taku-o/chromium

if you want to select installing Chromium version, use CHROMIUM_VERSION environment variable.

CHROMIUM_VERSION=76 npm install --save @taku-o/chromium

const chromium = require('@taku-o/chromium');
const {execFile} = require('child_process');

execFile(chromium.path, ['https://google.com'], err => {
	console.log('Hello Google!');
});

Proxy Configuration

When downloading the chromium binary node-chromium will use the proxy configured for npm to establish HTTP(S) connections. The proxy used by npm can be configured using

npm config set proxy http://<username>:<password>@<the.proxy.hostname>:<port>
npm config set https-proxy http://<username>:<password>@<the.proxy.hostname>:<port
npm config set no-proxy localhost,127.0.0.1,example.org

Additionally proxy settings found in the environment variables HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY will be used if they are not defined in the .npmrc file.

Selenium WebDriver Headless (without UI) tests

It's extremely easy to use node-chromium with selenium-webdriver to perform e2e tests without spawning browser UI. First, install all dependencies

npm install --save @taku-o/chromium
npm install --save chromedriver selenium-webdriver

After the installation is finished, create simple script that opens Google Search home page and takes it's screenshot in headless mode.

const fs = require('fs');
const webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver');
const chrome = require('selenium-webdriver/chrome');
const chromium = require('@taku-o/chromium');
require('chromedriver');

async function start() {
    let options = new chrome.Options();
    options.setChromeBinaryPath(chromium.path);
    options.addArguments('--headless');
    options.addArguments('--disable-gpu');
    options.addArguments('--window-size=1280,960');

    const driver = await new webdriver.Builder()
        .forBrowser('chrome')
        .setChromeOptions(options)
        .build();
		
    await driver.get('http://google.com');
    console.log('Hello Google!');
    await takeScreenshot(driver, 'google-start-page');
    
    await driver.quit();
}

async function takeScreenshot(driver, name) {
	await driver.takeScreenshot().then((data) => {
        fs.writeFileSync(name + '.png', data, 'base64');
        console.log('Screenshot is saved');
    });
}

start();

version mapping

| package version | default Chromium version | supported | | --------------- | ------------------------ | ----------------------------- | | 3.0.5 | 76 | Mac, Linux(x64), Win32, Win64 |

License

MIT