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Puppeteer in Lambda

To use Puppeteer in a Lambda function you need:

  1. puppeteer-core
  2. Chromium
    • In sst dev, we’ll use a locally installed Chromium version.
    • In sst deploy, we’ll use the @sparticuz/chromium package. It comes with a pre-built binary for Lambda.

Chromium version

Since Puppeteer has a preferred version of Chromium, we’ll need to check the version of Chrome that a given version of Puppeteer supports. Head over to the Puppeteer’s Chromium Support page and check which versions work together.

For example, Puppeteer v23.1.1 supports Chrome for Testing 127.0.6533.119. So, we’ll use the v127 of @sparticuz/chromium.

Terminal window
npm install puppeteer-core@23.1.1 @sparticuz/chromium@127.0.0

Install Chromium locally

To use this locally, you’ll need to install Chromium.

Terminal window
npx @puppeteer/browsers install chromium@latest --path /tmp/localChromium

Once installed you’ll see the location of the Chromium binary, /tmp/localChromium/chromium/mac_arm-1350406/chrome-mac/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium.

Update this in your Lambda function.

index.ts
// This is the path to the local Chromium binary
const YOUR_LOCAL_CHROMIUM_PATH = "/tmp/localChromium/chromium/mac_arm-1350406/chrome-mac/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium";

You’ll notice we are using the right binary with the SST_DEV environment variable.

index.ts
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
  args: chromium.args,
  defaultViewport: chromium.defaultViewport,
  executablePath: process.env.SST_DEV
    ? YOUR_LOCAL_CHROMIUM_PATH
    : await chromium.executablePath(),
  headless: chromium.headless,
});

Deploy

We don’t need a layer to deploy this because @sparticuz/chromium comes with a pre-built binary for Lambda.

We just need to set it in the nodejs.install.

sst.config.ts
{
  nodejs: {
    install: ["@sparticuz/chromium"]
  }
}

And on deploy, SST will use the right binary.

We are giving our function more memory and a longer timeout since running Puppeteer can take a while.

sst.config.ts
const api = new sst.aws.Function("MyFunction", {
  url: true,
  memory: "2 GB",
  timeout: "15 minutes",
  handler: "index.handler",
  nodejs: {
    install: ["@sparticuz/chromium"],
  },
});

View the full example.