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
.
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?
Step 1 - Set the environment variables
Whenever you install Puppeteer, it will first check for the environment variables listed below:
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
Click this button on the bottom right:
Click on the New button under System variables:
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 so this was the path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe
It'll take you to the file location and you can copy the path, and paste it into the environment variables.
Thanks for reading!
I hope you liked it! Comment down your thoughts! There is always room for improvement so let me know your suggestions!
Connect with me on my YouTube channel and my Twitter 😉
Until next time, keeping awesome ✌️!
Top comments (3)
Two days I've been offhandedly trying to fix this issue. The entire internet is purple with the keyword Puppeteer for me and you are the first person I saw mention that you have to specify an alternative exe once you skip the download of chromium. So simple I feel silly! Thank you so much
So delighted to see you found the fix ⭐
Thanks.😊