โšก How to skip Chromium download in Puppeteer?

โšก How to skip Chromium download in Puppeteer?

Time to save 120 MB of your disk space ๐Ÿ˜‰

ยท

2 min read

Hello again ๐Ÿ‘‹!

If you're a Node.js developer and you've used Puppeteer for web scraping, you might have seen that it downloads Chromium whenever you install puppeteer.

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Many of you people don't like to download an external web browser for this. You might have Chrome, Edge, Brave, or any other Chromium-based browser on your system so why not use that?

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Step 1 - Set the environment variables

Whenever you install Puppeteer, it will first check for the environment variables listed below:

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Read more on DevDocs: devdocs.io/puppeteer/index#environment-vari..

We are interested in PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD and PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH.

In your operating system, you have to set these two environment variables to these values ๐Ÿ‘‡

KeyValue
PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOADtrue
PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH{ PATH_TO_CHROME_OR_CHROMIUM }

On Windows

Search this term Edit the system environment variables in Start Menu and open it

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Click this button on the bottom right:

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Click on the New button under System variables:

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Enter the variable name and value as given below:

KeyValue
PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOADtrue
PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH{ PATH_TO_CHROME_OR_CHROMIUM }

Find browser's path

The simplest way to find the path to your browser's executable (on Windows) is to right-click the shortcut on the desktop, and click on Open file location.

In my case, I used Microsoft Edge so this was the path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe

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It'll take you to the file location and you can copy the path, and paste it into the environment variables.

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Thanks for reading!

I hope you liked it! Comment down your thoughts! There is always room for improvement so let me know your suggestions!

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Until next time, keeping awesome โœŒ๏ธ!

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