CHRome As A Service

Chraas: an Express server running headless Chrome as a service.

1. Supports setting of custom headers, cookies and proxies through a simple JSON API.
2. Returns cookies set by the target with Set-Cookie headers.
3. Implements stealth tactics by the excellent berstend/puppeteer-extra module to avoid bot detection.

Usage

To be used as a gateway server for rendering websites that require javascript execution or are protected by a firewall that tests javascript execution (bot detection, browser fingerprinting etc.)

Install

With npm installed, run

$ npm install
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install -y gconf-service libasound2 libatk1.0-0 libcairo2 libcups2 libfontconfig1 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libpango-1.0-0 libxss1 fonts-liberation libappindicator1 libnss3 lsb-release xdg-utils wget
$ wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
$ dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb; apt-get -fy install

Make a copy of .env.template and rename it .env

Default configuration can be overriden on the .env config file, in particular to set an api key to secure the server in production.

A docker image can be built by running

docker build

Run the server

In the project folder, run

node index.js

The server will be listening on port 8080 by default and the port can be overriden in the .env config file.

API

The server exposes three endpoints:

1. content -> returns the target url's html content
2. screenshot -> returns a full page screenshot of the target url
3. json -> returns the target url's content as json

Set custom proxies, headers and cookies sending a json payload as below. url is the only required input, along with api_key if set in .env config file

{
    "url":"https://www.httpbin.org/headers",
    "api_key":"",
    "proxy": {
        "host":"example_host",
        "port":"8080",
        "user":"example_user",
        "password":"example_password" 
    },
    "headers": {
        "Accept":"text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml",
        "Accept-Language":"en-US,en;q=0.9",
        "My-Custom-Header":"example_value"
    },
    "cookies": [
        {
        "name":"example_first_cookie_name",
        "value":"example_first_cookie_value"
        },
        {
        "name":"example_second_cookie_name",
        "value":"example_second_cookie_value"
        }
    ],
}