Note: This post was also published on dev.to
Headless Chrome is a newly released feature in Chrome 59 (Linux and Mac) and Chrome 60 (Windows). It allows for programmatically testing a website without launching a browser window, thus making automated tests far easier, which in turn gives you more confidence to change your app without breaking anything.
First of all, what is ‘headless’?
Headless basically means ‘without a GUI’, which means in Chrome’s case you’d be working with a programmable API, not with a GUI that you can interact with. A good example of Headless mode is when you’re dealing with servers using SSH, and doing all the interactions using shell commands.
Making use of Headless Chrome with Puppeteer
Puppeteer is an npm Package made by the Chrome team to easily interact with Headless Chrome with a convenient, high-level API.
It is a newly released module that is very similar to PhantomJS or Selenium, but it differs by using the latest versions of Chrome and using headless mode as a default.
What kind of tests can you run with Headless Chrome and Puppeteer?
A good use case for Puppeteer is automated tests for your UI, by taking screenshots of it or exporting it to a PDF.
Since headless Chrome gives you the ability to do anything a normal browser can, you can use it to automate an entire use case of your system (End to end tests). For example, user log-ins, form submissions, button clicks, page navigation, and more.
You can also use Puppeteer to periodically scrape websites, and store the relevant info you want to extract in a database, which is similar to what you could do with Python’s Beautiful Soup package.
Wrapping up
All in all, Puppeteer is a package that allows you to deal with web pages programmatically in an automated fashion, whether it is to take screenshots of a web page, or exporting it to PDFs, or clicking buttons and filling forms, or extracting/scraping the content of pages for later inspection. It offers you a very powerful API that allows you to do whatever you can do in a full-fledged browser, without needing the browser.
If you’re interested and want to know more about Headless Chrome, check this article out.
If you want to see examples of how to use Puppeteer, check here.