Puppeteer Extra: A Plug-in Framework for Headless Chrome and Puppeteer
For developers working on automation and web scraping projects, Puppeteer has become an essential tool. It's a headless browser that runs on the widely popular JavaScript engine V8. This article will introduce you to a GitHub project named Puppeteer Extra, a robust and versatile plug-in framework wrapping Puppeteer. With Puppeteer Extra, developers have a more flexible and customizable tool to perform tasks like automated testing, performance measuring, or crawling a SPA.
Project Overview:
When it comes to JavaScript-based browser automation tools, Puppeteer is a favorite. It provides capabilities ranging from generating screenshots and automating form submissions to creating pre-rendered content for SPAs. Puppeteer Extra extends this functionality with a plug-in architecture, allowing developers to add or override functionalities based on their specific use cases. The target audience is software developers and professionals who need to perform browser automation tasks.
Project Features:
The main highlight of Puppeteer Extra is its plug-in architecture. By structuring the tool in this manner, the project can be easily expanded with new features or updated to accommodate changes in the Puppeteer API. It features several built-in plugins, including stealth, adblocker, recaptcha, and flash. Additionally, due to its abstraction layer, developers can leverage all existing Puppeteer scripts without any required changes. This flexibility solves the problem of rigidity often encountered with existing browser automation tools.
Technology Stack:
Puppeteer Extra is entirely built on JavaScript, following the tech stack of the original Puppeteer project. As such, it relies on the Node.js runtime environment for backend operations. The choice of JavaScript ensures wide accessibility since it is a widespread and well-understood language in the web development sector. A notable library utilized by the project is cheerio, which enables jQuery-like syntax for working with downloaded web content.
Project Structure and Architecture:
The Puppeteer Extra project is divided into multiple sub-projects. Each plugin forms its own submodule, which helps in maintaining a loose coupling and high cohesion design. The interaction between the core project and plugins follows the observer design pattern, with the core project generating events that plugins can subscribe to and act upon.
