Could not find expected browser chrome locally

This Meteor code uses "puppeteer 8.0.0", "puppeteer-core 10.0.0", puppeteer-extra 3.1.18" and "puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth 2.7.8", It gives this error:

Error: Could not find expected browser (chrome) locally. Run npm install to download the correct Chromium revision (884014).

Tried "npm install" for no avail. Reading up online, tried removing "puppeteer-core": "^10.0.0" from package.json dependencies for no avail.

Any help is much appriciated. Thanks

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra');
const nameH = require('./NameH');

const puppeteerOptions = {
    headless: true,
    ignoreHTTPSErrors: true,
    args: ['--no-sandbox', '--single-process', '--no-zygote', '--disable-setuid-sandbox']
}

let browser;
let pageNameH;

const init = async () => {
    const StealthPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth');
    console.log('1')         //>>>>>>>>>>>> Prints 1
    puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin());
    console.log('2')         //>>>>>>>>>>>> Prints 2
    
    browser = await puppeteer.launch(puppeteerOptions);
    console.log('3') //>>>>>>>>> DID NOT PRINT <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
    pageNameH = await browser.newPage();
    console.log('4')

    await pageNameH.setUserAgent('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36');
    await pageNameH.setViewport({ width: 1366, height: 768 });
    await pageNameH.setRequestInterception(true);
    blockResources(pageNameH);
}

const blockResources = page => {
    page.on('request', (req) => {
    if (req.resourceType() == 'stylesheet' || req.resourceType() == 'font' || req.resourceType() == 'image') {
        req.abort();
    }
    else {
        req.continue();
    }
    });
}


export const abc = async (nm, loc) => {
    try {
    console.log('name try')       //>>>>>>>>>>>> Prints "name try"
    if (!(browser && pageNameH))
        await init();
    //use "required" nameh here

    } catch (error) { // print the error <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
    console.log("Could not launch Puppeteer or open a new page.\n" + error);
    if (browser && browser.close === 'function') await browser.close();
    }
}

// included in package.json
"dependencies": {
    "@babel/runtime": "^7.11.2",
    "axios": "^0.21.1",
    "check": "^1.0.0",
    "cheerio": "^1.0.0-rc.6",
    "jquery": "^3.5.1",
    "meteor-node-stubs": "^1.0.1",
    "nightmare": "^3.0.2",
    "pending-xhr-puppeteer": "^2.3.3",
    "puppeteer": "^8.0.0",
    "puppeteer-core": "^10.0.0",
    "puppeteer-extra": "^3.1.18",
    "puppeteer-extra-plugin-adblocker": "^2.11.11",
    "puppeteer-extra-plugin-block-resources": "^2.2.9",
    "puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth": "^2.7.8"
},

Solution 1:

may be you can try this, it works for me on linux(centos), puppeteer(10.2.0).

cd ./node_modules/puppeteer
npm run install

it will download the chromium to ./node_modules/puppeteer/.local-chromium

Solution 2:

I had the same problem. I checked my env variables, and even though PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD was set to false, it was still not working. After I removed the variable (unset PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD for mac), it worked.

related dependancies:

  "dependencies": {
    "chrome-aws-lambda": "^10.0.0",
    "puppeteer-core": "^10.0.0",
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "puppeteer": "^10.0.0",
  }

Launching Chromium:

    import chromium from "chrome-aws-lambda";

    const browser = await chromium.puppeteer.launch({
        executablePath: await chromium.executablePath,
    });

Solution 3:

Throwing my answer in, in hopes that it helps someone not waste their entire evening like I did.

I was writing a Typescript server that used Puppeteer, and I'm using ESBuild to transpile from TS to JS. In the build step, esbuild was trying to bundle everything into one file, but I had to instruct it to preserve the Puppeteer import from node_modules.

I did this by marking puppeteer as external. See docs here.

Since npm i downloads a compatible version of chromium to the node_modules folder, once I preserved this import, it was able to find Chromium in the node_modules folder.

My build file looks like:

require("esbuild").buildSync({
  entryPoints: ["src/index.ts"],
  outdir: "build",
  bundle: true,
  platform: "node",
  target: "node16",
  external: ["puppeteer"],
});

And I run it with node prod-build.js.

Now in my code, I can just call launch!
const browser = await puppeteer.launch()

Solution 4:

if you are testing locally, make sure you have puppeteer installed as dev dependencies. specifically

npm install puppeteer --save-dev

https://github.com/alixaxel/chrome-aws-lambda/wiki/HOWTO:-Local-Development#workaround

this approach allows us to rely on puppeteer for local development and puppeteer-core for production deployments.