Puppeteer Recorder

:warning: This is still work in progress

Puppeteer is a Node.js library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol.

This repository allows you to record Puppeteer scripts by interacting with the browser.

To start a new recording:

npx @puppeteer/recorder [url]

Every interaction with the page will be recorded and printed to the console as a script, which you can run with puppeteer. For now, this will download Chromium every time again. This has to be addressed on the puppeteer side. As a workaround, build this package locally (see Setup).

const {open, click, type, submit} = require('@puppeteer/recorder');
open('https://www.google.com/?hl=en', async () => {
  await click('ariaName/Search');
  await type('ariaName/Search', 'calculator');
  await click('ariaName/Google Search');
  await click('ariaName/1');
  await click('ariaName/plus');
  await click('ariaName/2');
  await click('ariaName/equals');
});

Command line options

• Pass --output file.js to write the output script to a file

Architecture

This project consists of three parts:

• Recorder: A CLI script that starts a Chromium instance to record user interactions
• Runner: An NPM package to abstract away the puppeteer details when running a recording
• Injected Script: The recorder injects this script into the browser to collect user interactions

Selectors

The usual way of identifying elements within a website is to use a CSS selector. But a lot of websites use automatically generated class names that do not carry any semantic value, and change frequently. To increase the reliability of scripts generated with this tool, we query using the ARIA model. Instead of

#tsf > div:nth-child(2) > div.A8SBwf > div.RNNXgb > div > div.a4bIc > input

the same element can also be identified by

combobox[name="Search"]

Setup

You can also check out this repository locally. To compile the injected script, the recorder and the runner:

npm install
npm run build

To make the package available to run via npx:

npm link

To run the package via npx:

npx recorder [url]

When running a recorded script, make sure this package is available in the local node_modules folder:

npm link @puppeteer/recorder

Debugging

Use the runner with DEBUG=1 to execute the script line by line.

For maintainers

How to publish new releases to npm

1. On the main branch, bump the version number in package.json:

   npm version patch -m 'Release v%s'

   Instead of patch, use minor or major as needed.

   Note that this produces a Git commit + tag.

2. Push the release commit and tag:

   git push               # push the commit
   git push origin v0.1.2 # push the tag

   Our CI then automatically publishes the new release to npm.

Known limitations

There are a number of known limitations:

• ~~It's currently not possible to record interactions inside of shadow doms~~
• It only records clicks, changes to text fields and form submits for now
• It does not handle Out-of-Process iframes (See Bug)