# ⚡ How to skip Chromium download in Puppeteer?

## Hello again 👋!

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`.


![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1629274490931/ylVdgUI0f.png)

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?

![1.gif](https://i.giphy.com/media/BpGWitbFZflfSUYuZ9/giphy.gif)

## Step 1 - Set the environment variables

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


![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1629278289686/EcmxpVUpV.png)
> Read more on DevDocs: https://devdocs.io/puppeteer/index#environment-variables

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 👇

| Key      | Value |
| ----------- | ----------- |
| PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD      | true       |
| PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH   | { PATH_TO_CHROME_OR_CHROMIUM }        |

## On Windows
Search this term `Edit the system environment variables` in Start Menu and open it

![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1629278539460/sA6iv6lmx.png)

Click this button on the bottom right:

![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1629278611843/w-R-M8rlY.png)

Click on the **New** button under **System variables**:

![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1629278662747/WHH5KilX1.png)

Enter the variable name and value as given below:

| Key      | Value |
| ----------- | ----------- |
| PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD      | true       |
| 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](https://microsoftedge.com) so this was the path: `C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe`


![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1629278809164/C8wooA7Fj.png)

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

![2.gif](https://c.tenor.com/oz5lssXIlfkAAAAC/sgn-we-did-it.gif)

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 ✌️!