Skip to main content
Version: 17.1.1

Contributing

First of all, thank you for your interest in Puppeteer! We'd love to accept your patches and contributions!

Contributor License Agreement

Contributions to this project must be accompanied by a Contributor License Agreement. You (or your employer) retain the copyright to your contribution, this simply gives us permission to use and redistribute your contributions as part of the project. Head over to https://cla.developers.google.com/ to see your current agreements on file or to sign a new one.

You generally only need to submit a CLA once, so if you've already submitted one (even if it was for a different project), you probably don't need to do it again.

Getting Code

  1. Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer
cd puppeteer
  1. Install the dependencies
npm install
# Downloads the Firefox binary for Firefox tests
PUPPETEER_PRODUCT=firefox npm install

Building Puppeteer

Puppeteer has two configurations for building:

  • npm run build (or npm run build:prod) - Builds Puppeteer and artifacts used in production.
  • npm run build:dev - Builds Puppeteer, tests, and artifacts used in production.

Testing Puppeteer

For browser testing, you can run

npm run build:dev && npm run test

We also have other tests such as test:types that tests types and test:install which tests installation. See the package.json for more tests (all prefixed with tests).

Code reviews

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult GitHub Help for more information on using pull requests.

Code Style

Our coding style is fully defined in .eslintrc (ESLint) and .prettierrc.cjs (Prettier).

Code is checked during pre-push using Husky, but you can check your code manually by running:

npm run lint

If some errors are returned, you can attempt to fix them using:

npm run format

Project structure

The following is a description of the primary folders in Puppeteer:

  • src - contains the source code for Puppeteer.
  • test/src - contains the source code for Puppeteer tests.
  • utils/scripts - contains various scripts.
  • utils/testserver - contains the source code for our test servers in testing.
  • compat - contains code separated by module import type. See compat/README.md for details.
  • test-d contains type tests using tsd.
  • vendor contains all dependencies that we vendor into the final build. See the vendor/README.md for details.

Shipping CJS and ESM bundles

Puppeteer ships both CommonJS and ES modules, therefore we maintain two tsconfig files for each project: tsconfig.esm.json and tsconfig.cjs.json. At build time we compile twice, once for CommonJS and once for ES modules.

We compile into the lib directory which is what we publish on the npm repository and it's structured like so:

lib
- cjs
- puppeteer <== the output of compiling `src/tsconfig.cjs.json`
- vendor <== the output of compiling `vendor/tsconfig.cjs.json`
- esm
- puppeteer <== the output of compiling `src/tsconfig.esm.json`
- vendor <== the output of compiling `vendor/tsconfig.esm.json`

tsconfig.json for the tests

We also maintain test/tsconfig.json. This is used to incrementally compile the unit test *.spec.ts files. Tests are run against the compiled code we ship to users so it gives us more confidence in our compiled output being correct.

Root tsconfig.json

The root tsconfig.json exists for the API Extractor; it has to find a tsconfig.json in the project's root directory.

API guidelines

When authoring new API methods, consider the following:

  • Expose as little information as needed. When in doubt, don’t expose new information.
  • Methods are used in favor of getters/setters.
    • The only exception is namespaces, e.g. page.keyboard and page.coverage
  • All string literals must be small case. This includes event names and option values.
  • Avoid adding "sugar" API (API that is trivially implementable in user-space) unless they're very demanded.

Commit messages

Commit messages should follow the Conventional Commits format. This is enforced via npm run commitlint.

In particular, breaking changes should clearly be noted as “BREAKING CHANGE:” in the commit message footer. Example:

fix(page): fix page.pizza method

This patch fixes page.pizza so that it works with iframes.

Issues: #123, #234

BREAKING CHANGE: page.pizza now delivers pizza at home by default.
To deliver to a different location, use the "deliver" option:
`page.pizza({deliver: 'work'})`.

Writing documentation

Documentation is generated via npm run docs. It is automatically published to our documentation site on merge and gets versioned on release.

Writing TSDoc comments

Each change to Puppeteer should be thoroughly documented using TSDoc comments. Refer to the API Extractor documentation for information on the exact syntax.

  • Every new method needs to have either @public or @internal added as a tag depending on if it is part of the public API.
  • Keep each line in a comment to no more than 90 characters (ESLint will warn you if you go over this). If you're a VSCode user the Rewrap plugin is highly recommended!

Running the documentation site locally

  1. At root, install all dependencies with npm i.
  2. run npm run docs which will generate all the .md files on puppeteer/docs/api.
  3. run npm i in puppeteer/website.
  4. run npm start in puppeteer/website.

Adding new dependencies

For all dependencies (both installation and development):

  • Do not add a dependency if the desired functionality is easily implementable.
  • If adding a dependency, it should be well-maintained and trustworthy.

A barrier for introducing new installation dependencies is especially high:

  • Do not add installation dependency unless it's critical to project success.

There are additional considerations for dependencies that are environment agonistic. See the vendor/README.md for details.

Running & Writing Tests

  • Every feature should be accompanied by a test.
  • Every public api event/method should be accompanied by a test.
  • Tests should not depend on external services.
  • Tests should work on all three platforms: Mac, Linux and Win. This is especially important for screenshot tests.

Puppeteer tests are located in the test directory and are written using Mocha. See test/README.md for more details.

Despite being named 'unit', these are integration tests, making sure public API methods and events work as expected.

  • To run all tests:
npm run test
  • To run a specific test, substitute the it with it.only:
  ...
it.only('should work', async function({server, page}) {
const response = await page.goto(server.EMPTY_PAGE);
expect(response.ok).toBe(true);
});
  • To disable a specific test, substitute the it with xit (mnemonic rule: 'cross it'):
  ...
// Using "xit" to skip specific test
xit('should work', async function({server, page}) {
const response = await page.goto(server.EMPTY_PAGE);
expect(response.ok).toBe(true);
});
  • To run Chrome tests in non-headless mode:
HEADLESS=false npm run test:chrome:headless
  • To run Firefox tests, firstly ensure you have Firefox installed locally (you only need to do this once, not on every test run) and then you can run the tests:
PUPPETEER_PRODUCT=firefox npm install
npm run test:firefox
  • To run experimental Chromium MacOS ARM tests, firstly ensure you have correct Chromium version installed locally (you only need to do this once, not on every test run) and then you can run the tests:
PUPPETEER_EXPERIMENTAL_CHROMIUM_MAC_ARM=1 npm install
PUPPETEER_EXPERIMENTAL_CHROMIUM_MAC_ARM=1 npm run test:chrome:headless
  • To run tests with custom browser executable:
BINARY=<path-to-executable> npm run test:chrome:headless # Or npm run test:firefox

API Coverage

Every public API method or event should be called at least once in tests. To ensure this, the main test command runs coverage during testing.

Debugging Puppeteer

See Debugging Tips in the readme.

For Project Maintainers

Rolling new Chromium version

The following steps are needed to update the Chromium version.

  1. Find a suitable Chromium revision Not all revisions have builds for all platforms, so we need to find one that does. To do so, run utils/check_availability.js -rd to find the latest suitable dev Chromium revision (see utils/check_availability.js -help for more options).
  2. Update src/revisions.ts with the found revision number.
  3. Update versions.js with the new Chromium-to-Puppeteer version mapping and update lastMaintainedChromiumVersion with the latest stable Chrome version.
  4. Run npm run check:protocol-revision. If it fails, update package.json with the expected devtools-protocol version.
  5. Run npm run build and npm install.
  6. Run npm test and ensure that all tests pass. If a test fails, bisect the upstream cause of the failure, and either update the test expectations accordingly (if it was an intended change) or work around the changes in Puppeteer (if it’s not desirable to change Puppeteer’s observable behavior).
  7. Commit and push your changes and open a pull request. The commit message must contain the version in Chromium <version> (<revision>) format to ensure that pptr.dev can parse it correctly, e.g. 'feat(chromium): roll to Chromium 90.0.4427.0 (r856583)'.

Bisecting upstream changes

Sometimes, performing a Chromium roll causes tests to fail. To figure out the cause, you need to bisect Chromium revisions to figure out the earliest possible revision that changed the behavior. The script in utils/bisect.js can be helpful here. Given a pattern for one or more unit tests, it will automatically bisect the current range:

node utils/bisect.js --good 686378 --bad 706915 script.js
node utils/bisect.js --unit-test Response.fromCache

By default, it will use the Chromium revision in src/revisions.ts from the main branch and from the working tree to determine the range to bisect.

Releasing to npm

We use release-please to automate releases. When a release should be done, check for the release PR in our pull requests and merge it.