Headless Chrome on Heroku

I’ve been experimenting with headless chrome for a Link Unshortener tool I’ve built to take screenshots of websites. I’ve been using BrowserShot which is great. It’s a php wrapper around Puppeteer which makes it simple to use in Laravel. To experiment more with Puppeteer, I wanted to get a node app running on Heroku. Overall it’s pretty straight forward but there are a few gotchas.

Here is a sample project that should get you started. Clone this and take a look at the source. You’ll notice I specified the node.js version in the package.json file. This is required for Heroku to know what version of node to use. Another issue I ran into is to run Puppeteer on Heroku you have to specify –no-sandbox. They last hurdle was adding the puppeteer Heroku buildpack. Follow the steps below and you should have a working screenshot app running locally and on Heroku. These instructions assume you are familiar with node and Heroku. Read More