Using Puppeteer in AWS Node ElasticBeanstalk

Our company project has to send out reports and I like the flow of generating those reports from a web page to PDF conversion. We can reuse the tools and skills we use on our web analytics dashboards to develop the reports, with the added benefit that the reports look exactly like the web pages.

I first saw this flow from PhantomJS, the scriptable, headless browser. Load a web page into Phantom, say "gimme a PDF of that web page", re-configure settings 50 times to get it to look better, and boom!, you have a PDF of that web page. This is what we were using in our NodeJS server until reading this note and running into this issue. So we switched to Puppeteer, a similar project that was made for NodeJS and backed up by Google Chrome team.

Our servers deploy into AWS ElasticBeanstalk, their Node Environment. We haven't the need for containers or ECS yet, though did need a trick to get Puppeteer working in project. Things worked locally, but certain required things were not on the AWS Linux machines we were using, and getting those libraries installed on Beanstalk was a bit of a hassle.

A lot came from this StackOverflow question/answer (which itself came from somewhere else). Ultimately, through some trial-and-error, I created an ebextension config file to allow Chromium to install when Puppeteer is installed for the Node project.

File is below, and locally at .ebextensions/chromiumpackages.config. These run in order, first the yum packages and then the mysterious rpm commands. Note the use of --replacepkgs, otherwise your script will run the first time and fail subsequent times because the packages are already there. Yes, I guess technically we are downloading files and try/failing rather than checking if they exist, but it sure does keep the file simple!

And that's it. This config file runs when beanstalk makes a new instance, and then Chromium installs cleanly when my NodeJS project installs puppeteer. Yay!