🔹 What is Puppeteer?

Puppeteer is a Node.js library developed by Google’s Chrome team.
It provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium browsers via the DevTools Protocol.

👉 Think of it as a remote control 🎮 for Chrome – you can automate everything a human can do in a browser!

🛠️ Key Features of Puppeteer

✨ Browser Automation – Open tabs, navigate, click, type, scroll.
✨ Web Scraping – Extract structured data from websites.
✨ Testing – Run automated tests for UI and front-end apps.
✨ Screenshots & PDFs – Capture pages as images or generate PDFs.
✨ Crawling – Crawl multiple pages just like a bot.
✨ Headless & Headful – Run Chrome invisibly (headless 🕶️) or visibly (headful 👀).

⚡ How Puppeteer Works

Install Puppeteer

npm install puppeteer

Basic Example – Open Google and take a screenshot 📸

const puppeteer = require("puppeteer");

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();  // Start browser
  const page = await browser.newPage();      // Open a new tab
  await page.goto("https://google.com");     // Go to Google
  await page.screenshot({ path: "google.png" }); // Screenshot
  await browser.close();                     // Close browser
})();

🎯 Use Cases

🔍 Web Scraping → Extract product prices, job listings, news, etc.
🤖 Automation → Fill forms, auto-login, simulate user actions.
🧪 Testing → Automated UI testing for websites & web apps.
📑 PDF Generation → Convert invoices, resumes, or reports into PDFs.
📸 Screenshots → Capture pages for monitoring or preview.

🌈 Advantages

✅ Maintained by Google Chrome team (high reliability).
✅ Supports modern JS & CSS features.
✅ Easy screenshot & PDF generation.
✅ Full DevTools control.

⚠️ Limitations

❌ Needs more resources than lightweight scrapers (like Cheerio/BeautifulSoup).
❌ Some websites block bots → may need stealth plugins.
❌ Only works with Chromium/Chrome (not all browsers).

🆚 Puppeteer vs Others

Selenium → Works with many browsers (cross-browser), but slower.
Playwright → Puppeteer’s younger sibling (also from Microsoft, more powerful, supports multiple browsers).
BeautifulSoup / Cheerio → Just parsers (no JS execution), Puppeteer executes full JavaScript pages.

📌 In Short:
👉 Puppeteer = Automation + Scraping + Testing in Chrome/Chromium.
It’s like having a robot browser buddy 🤖💻.