Puppeteer Proxy

In simple terms, Puppeteer is a node library that provides developers with a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium-based browsers. A headless browser has no user interface and is used mainly for automated testing. In addition to controlling headless browsers, Puppeteer can also be configured to control non-headless Chrome or Chromium-based browsers.

Puppeteer offers the same functionality as other browsers. Below are some of the platform’s top features:

Testing chrome extensions Recording your website’s timeline trace to test for performance issues Automating form submission, keyboard input, and more Crawling single-page applications and generating pre-rendered content

Puppeteer allows users to perform high-level tasks such as Puppeteer web scraping. Now that you have a brief idea of what Puppeteer is and what it can do, why do you need proxies for the tool?

We saw that Puppeteer is an API tool used to control headless and non-headless Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. You can use it for various purposes, including web scraping and automation. While these are high-level functional features, they have a significant downside.

Accessing a website using an API with codes is likely to raise eyebrows since it points out that you are using a bot. Most websites are against non-human traffic, and you will end up getting blocked in most cases. How exactly do websites detect that you are using a bot? Easy. They monitor the number of requests coming from your IP address. If there are too many of them, then it is flagged as bot traffic.

This is where proxies come in handy. These tools allow you to rotate your IP address with every few requests or assign a different IP to every request you make. This way, the website will not detect that you are using Puppeteer for automation.

In some instances, you might want to crawl content in a geo-restricted region. Such websites monitor the user IPs to determine their location. If your IP points to a blocked area, the website will prevent you from accessing the content. Luckily, there’s an easy way around this. You can simply change your IP address using a proxy server. The trick is to use a server from a region where the content is accessible.

Many proxies are available for users today, with datacenter and residential proxies being the most common. In truth, any type of proxy will work with Puppeteer. However, it is best if you stay away from free proxies. They tend to be unreliable. More importantly, you don’t know who’s behind them in most cases. Many free proxies often serve as a front for cybercriminals looking to steal your private data and sell it to whoever is willing to pay for it.

Furthermore, if you will use Puppeteer for tasks such as web scraping and automation, it is best to stick to rotating residential proxies. These proxies are designed to rotate your IP address after a certain period or with every new request and have the added advantage of being nearly impossible to detect.

The code below is designed to set up a proxy server for Puppeteer.

import puppeteer from ‘puppeteer’;

import {

  createPageProxy,

} from ‘puppeteer-proxy’;

(async () => {

  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();

  const page = await browser.newPage();

  const pageProxy = createPageProxy({

    page,

  });

  await page.setRequestInterception(true);

  page.once(‘request’, async (request) => {

    await pageProxy.proxyRequest({

      request,

      proxyUrl: ‘http://127.0.0.1:3000’,

    });

  });

  await page.goto(‘https://google.com’);

})();