node-chromium-revision

Chromium binaries for your NodeJS project

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

Usage

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

npm install --save chromium

During the installation process node-chromium-revision will find the latest suitable build for your platform (unless you specify a revision number), download it and extract into libraries folder. As soon as installation is finished, you are ready to use Chromium in your project:

const chromium = require('chromium-revision');
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-revision 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.

Install a concrete revision

If you want to specify the revision of Chromium to be installed, just set the environment variable CHROMIUM_REVISION to the number of the revision you want to install, as in:

export CHROMIUM_REVISION=729994

Selenium WebDriver Headless (without UI) tests

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

npm install --save chromium 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('chromium-revision');
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();

License

MIT