LaunchpadLite

You can launch browsers! With NodeJS!

• Local browsers for MacOS, Windows and Linux (like) operating systems

This is a fork of Launchpad paired down just for my needs.

Rational

I only need to launch a browser for the user to view a page, not for testing. I didn't want to start from scratch beceause I knew there's likely lots of little issues I'm not aware of.

But, that also means much of the functionality of the original launchpad was stuff I didn't need.

I found a few issues. It didn't work in my XP. The code expected LOCALAPPDATA but for whatever reason on my XP there's only APPDATA. It also didn't work on my Windows 8.1. I don't know what the issue was but removing the version checking code fixed that. ShowVer.exe which they included runs on Windows 8.1 but I didn't need any version info so I just ripped that out.

I removed all the code related to checking for the browser already running.

I also needed the option to launch the user's default browser so I added that it. It's identified as "default".

It's down from 43k lines of dependencies to 3.7k lines of which 3k are the underscore and q npm modules.

API

var launch = require('launchpad');
var optionsPassedToChildProcessSpawn = {
  detach: true, // If you want to be able to exit node without killing the browser.
};

launch.local(optionsPassedToChildProcessSpawn, function(error, launcher) {
  launcher.browsers(function(error, browsers) {
    // -> List of available browsers
    browsers.forEach(function(browser) {
      console.log(browser.name);
    });
  });

  launcher[<browsername>](url, function(error, instance) {
    instance.id // -> unique instance id
    instance.stop(callback) // -> Stop the instance
    instance.status(callback) // -> Get status information about the instance
  });
});