Run Puppeteer/Chrome Headless on EC2 Amazon Linux AMI

Published in

MockingBot

2 min readNov 6, 2017

Update 05/18: This work well with Puppeteer 1.3.0 on the latest AMI release (2018.03).

If you’re using EC2 which run Amazon Linux, and you’d like to try Google’s Puppeteer (Chrome Headless), below’s tutorial verified on a EC2 instance run the latest Amazon Linux AMI release 2017.09.

1. Install Puppeteer 0.12

# Install Node from npm
$ curl --silent --location https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo bash -
$ sudo yum install -y nodejs gcc-c++ make
# Install puppeteer
$ mkdir my_project
$ cd my_project
$ npm i puppeteer
$ cd node_modules/puppeteer/
# Chrome version may be different depending on the version of Puppeteer.
$ cd .local-chromium/linux-508693/chrome-linux
$ ldd chrome | grep not

2. Install Chrome dependencies

After run ldd, you should get below output:

$ ldd chrome | grep not
	libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 => not found
	libpango-1.0.so.0 => not found
	libcairo.so.2 => not found
	libXcursor.so.1 => not found
	libXdamage.so.1 => not found
	libXfixes.so.3 => not found
	libcups.so.2 => not found
	libXss.so.1 => not found
	libXrandr.so.2 => not found
	libgconf-2.so.4 => not found
	libatk-1.0.so.0 => not found
	libgtk-3.so.0 => not found
	libgdk-3.so.0 => not found
	libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => not found

Most of them can be resolved with a simple yum install:

$ sudo yum install cups-libs dbus-glib libXrandr libXcursor libXinerama cairo cairo-gobject pango

Let’s run ldd again:

$ ldd chrome | grep not
	libXss.so.1 => not found
	libgconf-2.so.4 => not found
	libatk-1.0.so.0 => not found
	libgtk-3.so.0 => not found
	libgdk-3.so.0 => not found
	libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => not found

Now only 6 left, as Amazon Linux don’t have gtk builtin, we need borrow packages from other distributions:

# Install ATK from CentOS 7
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/atk-2.22.0-3.el7.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/at-spi2-atk-2.22.0-2.el7.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/at-spi2-core-2.22.0-1.el7.x86_64.rpm# Install GTK from fedora 20
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/20/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/g/GConf2-3.2.6-7.fc20.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/20/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/l/libXScrnSaver-1.2.2-6.fc20.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/20/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/l/libxkbcommon-0.3.1-1.fc20.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/20/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/l/libwayland-client-1.2.0-3.fc20.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/20/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/l/libwayland-cursor-1.2.0-3.fc20.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/20/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/g/gtk3-3.10.4-1.fc20.x86_64.rpm# Install Gdk-Pixbuf from fedora 16
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/16/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/gdk-pixbuf2-2.24.0-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm

Final check:

$ ldd chrome | grep not
# Great, all dependencies are resolved.

Time to take snapshot:

$ ./chrome --headless --disable-gpu --screenshot https://www.chromestatus.com/

And here’s what we got:

Run Puppeteer/Chrome Headless on EC2 Amazon Linux AMI

Written by MockingBot