Puppeteer doesn't close browser

Question

I'm running puppeteer on express/node/ubuntu as follow:

var puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
var express = require('express');
var router = express.Router();

/* GET home page. */
router.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
    (async () => {
        headless = true;
        const browser = await puppeteer.launch({headless: true, args:['--no-sandbox']});
        const page = await browser.newPage();
        url = req.query.url;
        await page.goto(url);
        let bodyHTML = await page.evaluate(() => document.body.innerHTML);
        res.send(bodyHTML)
        await browser.close();
    })();
});

running this script multiple times leaves hundred of Zombies:

$ pgrep chrome | wc -l
133

Which clogs the srv,

How do I fix this?

Running kill from a Express JS script could solve it?

Is there a better way to get the same result other than puppeteer and headless chrome?

Solution 1

I solve it with https://www.npmjs.com/package/shelljs

var shell = require('shelljs');
shell.exec('pkill chrome')

Solution 2

Ahhh! This is a simple oversight. What if an error occurs and your await browser.close() never executes thus leaving you with zombies.

Using shell.js seems to be a hacky way of solving this issue.

The better practice is to use try..catch..finally. The reason being you would want the browser to be closed irrespective of a happy flow or an error being thrown. And unlike the other code snippet, you don't have to try and close the browser in the both the catch block and finally block. finally block is always executed irrespective of whether an error is thrown or not.

So, your code should look like,

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
const express = require('express');

const router = express.Router();

/* GET home page. */
router.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
  (async () => {
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
      headless: true,
      args: ['--no-sandbox'],
    });

    try {
      const page = await browser.newPage();
      url = req.query.url;
      await page.goto(url);
      const bodyHTML = await page.evaluate(() => document.body.innerHTML);
      res.send(bodyHTML);
    } catch (e) {
      console.log(e);
    } finally {
      await browser.close();
    }
  })();
});

Hope this helps!

Solution 3

wrap your code in try-catch like this and see if it helps

headless = true;
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({headless: true, args:['--no-sandbox']});
try {
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  url = req.query.url;
  await page.goto(url);
  let bodyHTML = await page.evaluate(() => document.body.innerHTML);
  res.send(bodyHTML);
  await browser.close();
} catch (error) {
  console.log(error);
} finally {
  await browser.close();
}

Solution 4

From my experience, the browser closing process may take some time after close is called. Anyway, you can check the browser process property to check if it's still not closed and force kill it.

if (browser && browser.process() != null) browser.process().kill('SIGINT');

I'm also posting the full code of my puppeteer resources manager below. Take a look at bw.on('disconnected', async () => {

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra')
const randomUseragent = require('random-useragent');
const StealthPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth')

const USER_AGENT = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.75 Safari/537.36';
puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin())

function ResourceManager(loadImages) {
    let browser = null;
    const _this = this;
    let retries = 0;
    let isReleased = false;

    this.init = async () => {
        isReleased = false;
        retries = 0;
        browser = await runBrowser();
    };

    this.release = async () => {
        isReleased = true;
        if (browser) await browser.close();
    }

    this.createPage = async (url) => {
        if (!browser) browser = await runBrowser();
        return await createPage(browser,url);
    }

    async function runBrowser () {
        const bw = await puppeteer.launch({
            headless: true,
            devtools: false,
            ignoreHTTPSErrors: true,
            slowMo: 0,
            args: ['--disable-gpu','--no-sandbox','--no-zygote','--disable-setuid-sandbox','--disable-accelerated-2d-canvas','--disable-dev-shm-usage', "--proxy-server='direct://'", "--proxy-bypass-list=*"]
        });

        bw.on('disconnected', async () => {
            if (isReleased) return;
            console.log("BROWSER CRASH");
            if (retries <= 3) {
                retries += 1;
                if (browser && browser.process() != null) browser.process().kill('SIGINT');
                await _this.init();
            } else {
                throw "===================== BROWSER crashed more than 3 times";
            }
        });

        return bw;
    }

    async function createPage (browser,url) {
        const userAgent = randomUseragent.getRandom();
        const UA = userAgent || USER_AGENT;
        const page = await browser.newPage();
        await page.setViewport({
            width: 1920 + Math.floor(Math.random() * 100),
            height: 3000 + Math.floor(Math.random() * 100),
            deviceScaleFactor: 1,
            hasTouch: false,
            isLandscape: false,
            isMobile: false,
        });
        await page.setUserAgent(UA);
        await page.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
        await page.setDefaultNavigationTimeout(0);
        if (!loadImages) {
            await page.setRequestInterception(true);
            page.on('request', (req) => {
                if(req.resourceType() == 'stylesheet' || req.resourceType() == 'font' || req.resourceType() == 'image'){
                    req.abort();
                } else {
                    req.continue();
                }
            });
        }

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            //pass webdriver check
            Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'webdriver', {
                get: () => false,
            });
        });

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            //pass chrome check
            window.chrome = {
                runtime: {},
                // etc.
            };
        });

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            //pass plugins check
            const originalQuery = window.navigator.permissions.query;
            return window.navigator.permissions.query = (parameters) => (
                parameters.name === 'notifications' ?
                    Promise.resolve({ state: Notification.permission }) :
                    originalQuery(parameters)
            );
        });

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            // Overwrite the `plugins` property to use a custom getter.
            Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'plugins', {
                // This just needs to have `length > 0` for the current test,
                // but we could mock the plugins too if necessary.
                get: () => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
            });
        });

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            // Overwrite the `plugins` property to use a custom getter.
            Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'languages', {
                get: () => ['en-US', 'en'],
            });
        });

        await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: 'networkidle2',timeout: 0 } );
        return page;
    }
}

module.exports = {ResourceManager}

View more solutions

Comments

[Elia Weiss]

Good point, 10x. how ever, I think the try should be after const browser =... for it to be used in the catch/finally, isn't it?

[Elia Weiss]

UPDATE: I tried both solution, I have significantly less zombie, but still I have about 20 left every day

[Pencilcheck]

this works for me, somehow browser.close doesn't work but this command works.

[voidmind]

I adapted his code to one of the sample code found on the Puppeteer web site. To be honest, I'm kind of new to async/await and Promises so I don't fully understand why executing the browser object code in a then() is any different than doing a series of statements preceded by await. All I know is that my code is very similar and changing it to that fixed the issue.

[Austin]

will it kill all chrome instances running in system or it will only the chrome instances puppeteer script started

[Elia Weiss]

it suppose to kill all process

[Flame]

Can you explain whats happening here? Your code sample looks the same to me as the original one. It's only in a try-catch-finally block, but the order of execution is the same right? Also, what do you mean with "execution time stops"? Execution doesn't stop unless you use return. You can do any amount of work after calling res.send().

[Admin]

can't believe this is the accepted answer. Not for the answer itself, but for the fact that we are almost forced to do this to simply close puppeteer processes

[ggorlen]

browser needs to be declared in an outer scope so it's in scope for the finally block, otherwise you'll get ReferenceError: browser is not defined. This code also makes various globals, headless and url. Always use const or let to scope variables correctly.

[ggorlen]

await browser.close(); in the try and catch blocks is redundant. finally will run after both blocks regardless of whether an error is thrown. Use const url and const headless to avoid unnecessary, error-prone globals.

[Mukesh]

Yes, it was redundant

[Joel'-']

This answer is terrible, because it will kill all chrome instances. In the original code, it was clear that puppeteer was running in an API, meaning that if there are more than 1 api request at the same time, the other requests will fail.

[Admin]

Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please edit to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center.

[lezhumain]

This is wrong. browser is an object of type Browser, as you can see in the documentation: puppeteer.github.io/puppeteer/docs/puppeteer.browser

[Md. Hasan Mahmud]

I don't know how, But this actually worked for me. I was using a puppeteer instance outside of my router function. Then call it inside the router function. I was getting error's like browser.newPage() is not a function.

[lezhumain]

Then your "browser" object probably was a Promise<Browser> in your case and thus didn't have the "close" method, but that's not how it usually is.