Make Puppeteer use local profile's cookies

Question

I want to use my local user's profile with Puppeteer. However, it doesn't seem to work.

I launch it with these args.

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    executablePath: '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome',
    userDataDir: '/Users/me/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome',
});

When headless, it doesn't use the user's local profile's cookies at all, even though I'd expect it to. When it isn't headless, it can't even open the tab; Puppeteer crashes with

(node:23303) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: Failed to launch chrome!


TROUBLESHOOTING: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/docs/troubleshooting.md

Is there a way to use my local user's profile? I'm using ^1.7.0 and Chrome 70.0.3521.2.

Answer 1

Rather than setting a userDataDir path in the Puppeteer.launch arguments you can use the chrome-cookies-secure NPM package to use cookies for one of your existing Chrome Profiles. This solution does not require Chrome Canary to be installed.

With your macOS keychain authorisation, the package reads the cookies for a given url from your hard-disk and makes them accessible in NodeJS. You can then load them into Puppeteer using the page.setCookie(...) method.

Here's an example:

const chrome = require('chrome-cookies-secure');
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

const url = 'https://www.yourUrl.com';

const getCookies = (callback) => {
    chrome.getCookies(url, 'puppeteer', function(err, cookies) {
        if (err) {
            console.log(err, 'error');
            return
        }
        console.log(cookies, 'cookies');
        callback(cookies);
    }, 'yourProfile') // e.g. 'Profile 2'
}

// find profiles at ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome

getCookies(async (cookies) => {
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
        headless: false
    });
    const page = await browser.newPage();

    await page.setCookie(...cookies);
    await page.goto(url);
    await page.waitFor(1000);
    browser.close()
});