Possible to run Headless Chrome/Chromium in a Google Cloud Function?

Question

Is there any way to run Headless Chrome/Chromium in a Google Cloud Function? I understand I can include and run statically compiled binaries in GCF. Can I get a statically compiled version of Chrome that would work for this?

Answer 1

The Node.js 8 runtime for Google Cloud Functions now includes all the necessary OS packages to run Headless Chrome.

Here is a code sample of an HTTP function that returns screenshots:

Main index.js file:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

exports.screenshot = async (req, res) => {
  const url = req.query.url;

  if (!url) {
    return res.send('Please provide URL as GET parameter, for example: <a href="?url=https://example.com">?url=https://example.com</a>');
  }

  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    args: ['--no-sandbox']
  });
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto(url);
  const imageBuffer = await page.screenshot();
  await browser.close();

  res.set('Content-Type', 'image/png');
  res.send(imageBuffer);
}

and package.json

{
  "name": "screenshot",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "dependencies": {
    "puppeteer": "^1.6.2"
  }
}

Answer 2

I've just deployed a GCF function running headless Chrome. A couple takeways:

1. you have to statically compile Chromium and NSS on Debian 8
2. you have to patch environment variables to point to NSS before launching Chromium
3. performance is much worse than what you'd get on AWS Lambda (3+ seconds)

For 1, you should be able to find plenty of instructions online.

For 2, the code that I'm using is the following:

static executablePath() {
  let bin = path.join(__dirname, '..', 'bin', 'chromium');
  let nss = path.join(__dirname, '..', 'bin', 'nss', 'Linux3.16_x86_64_cc_glibc_PTH_64_OPT.OBJ');

  if (process.env.PATH === undefined) {
    process.env.PATH = path.join(nss, 'bin');
  } else if (process.env.PATH.indexOf(nss) === -1) {
    process.env.PATH = [path.join(nss, 'bin'), process.env.PATH].join(':');
  }

  if (process.env.LD_LIBRARY_PATH === undefined) {
    process.env.LD_LIBRARY_PATH = path.join(nss, 'lib');
  } else if (process.env.LD_LIBRARY_PATH.indexOf(nss) === -1) {
    process.env.LD_LIBRARY_PATH = [path.join(nss, 'lib'), process.env.LD_LIBRARY_PATH].join(':');
  }

  if (fs.existsSync('/tmp/chromium') === true) {
    return '/tmp/chromium';
  }

  return new Promise(
    (resolve, reject) => {
      try {
        fs.chmod(bin, '0755', () => {
          fs.symlinkSync(bin, '/tmp/chromium'); return resolve('/tmp/chromium');
        });
      } catch (error) {
        return reject(error);
      }
    }
  );
}

You also need to use a few required arguments when starting Chrome, namely:

--disable-dev-shm-usage
--disable-setuid-sandbox
--no-first-run
--no-sandbox
--no-zygote
--single-process

I hope this helps.