Automate Browser using Puppeteer Sharp in C#

PuppeteerSharp

In this article, I will talk about Puppeteer Sharp.

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. Puppeteer runs headless by default, but can be configured to run full (non-headless) Chrome or Chromium.

Before going further, I assume, you have an idea about HtmlAgilityPack.

HAP (HtmlAgilityPack) is an HTML parser written in C# to read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT.

Don’t worry, I will talk about HtmlAgilityPack in a separate article.

So, Let’s get started.

The most common use cases for it is logging into different websites. In this article, we will walk through the process of logging into LinkedIn using PuppeteerSharp.

To get started with PuppeteerSharp, you first need to install the package through NuGet.

dotnet add package PuppeteerSharp

To log into LinkedIn, we will first navigate to the login page. Before navigation to login page. we need to download ChromiumBrowser

await new BrowserFetcher().DownloadAsync(BrowserFetcher.DefaultChromiumRevision);

In order to open the browser we will use the Puppeteer.LaunchAsync() method to launch a new browser instance and interact with web pages.

Puppeteer.LaunchAsync method takes an optional LaunchOptions object as a parameter, which can be used to configure the browser instance.

• Headless : A boolean value indicating whether to launch the browser in headless mode (true) or with a visible UI (false)
• ExecutablePath: A string representing the path to the Chromium executable
• SlowMo: A value in milliseconds that slows down Puppeteer operations to make them easier to observe.
• Timeout : A value in milliseconds that sets the maximum time to wait for the browser instance to start.

For the time being we will use Headless only.

var browser = await Puppeteer.LaunchAsync(new LaunchOptions() { Headless = false })

Next, We will open a tab first then navigate to LinkedIn login page through following command:

// Open a new tab
    var page = await browser.NewPageAsync();

// Navigate to the LinkedIn login page
   await page.GoToAsync("https://www.linkedin.com/login");

When login page is loaded successfully. then we fill the email and password field by Page class object page. Let’s see how to it will do.

 // Fill in the email field
     await page.TypeAsync("input[name=session_key]", "your_email");

 // Fill in the password field
    await page.TypeAsync("input[name=session_password]", "your_password");

After filling the both fields, we need to click the Login button.

  // Click the login button
    await page.ClickAsync("button.from__button--floating");

Following line, wait for the login to complete.

await page.WaitForNavigationAsync();

When login is finished we will navigate to notification page (LinkedIn notification page).

await page.GoToAsync("https://www.linkedin.com/notifications");

Here is the full code of our article

async Task AutomateLinkedInHomePage()
{
    await new BrowserFetcher().DownloadAsync(BrowserFetcher.DefaultChromiumRevision);
    var browser = await Puppeteer.LaunchAsync(new LaunchOptions() { Headless = false });

    // Open a new tab
    var page = await browser.NewPageAsync();

    // Navigate to the LinkedIn login page
    await page.GoToAsync("https://www.linkedin.com/login");

    // Fill in the email field
    await page.TypeAsync("input[name=session_key]", "your_email");

    // Fill in the password field
    await page.TypeAsync("input[name=session_password]", "your_password");

    // Click the login button
    await page.ClickAsync("button.from__button--floating");

    await page.WaitForNavigationAsync();

    await page.GoToAsync("https://www.linkedin.com/notifications");
}

This is done for now. Hopefully, you enjoyed it. Have a nice day !!!