A headful chromium in a docker container; waiting to have your strings attached.

Testing and API crawling via the remote debugging API, with

• 📺 headful chromium; using xvfb
• 🕶 stealth mode for user-detection or DDOS-prevention evasion
• 📰 logging console events, page- and request errors to container output

⚡ this image is BIG (900M)

Run the container and expose the remote debugging port (default: 9222)

docker run -p 9222:9222 bitmeal/headful-puppet

Configure the container using environment variables with the -e flag:

• STEALTH: enable stealth mode; see below; off by default, set any value to enable
• PORT: debug interface port to listen on for external connections; default 9222
• PORT_INTERNAL: internal port; proxied to PORT; default 9992

Use your favourite implementation of the chrome remote debugging API and point it to the address of your container, or localhost if port is exposed. The default config uses the default remote debugging port 9222.

// node.js + puppeteer example

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-core');

(async () => {
	const browser = await puppeteer.connect({ browserURL: 'http://localhost:9222' });
    const page = await browser.newPage();

    await page.goto('https://github.com/bitmeal', { waitUntil: 'networkidle2' });
    // do something
    await page.close();

    browser.disconnect();
})();

The example shows the use of puppeteer in Node.js, though any other implementation of the API may be used. When using puppeteer, you may use the puppeteer-core package in your application to skip fetching a local chromium executable.

docker run -p 9222:9222 -e STEALTH=1 bitmeal/headful-puppet

For API crawling on endpoints with user-detection or DDOS-prevention mechanisms, the packages puppeteer-extra and puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth provide chromium with the necessary flags and settings for successful evasion mechanisms. Here, relying on tried community resources allows faster integration and deployment, and is the main motivation to use puppeteer as a provider for chromium.

To use stealth mode to its' full capabilities, use Node.js with pupeteer, puppeteer-extra and puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth packages as your API. See the example below, additionally demoing the use of an incognito context:

// node.js + puppeteer STEALTH mode example

// !! puppeteer with: npm i puppeteer@npm:puppeteer-core
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra');
const StealthPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth');
puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin());

(async () => {
	const browser = await puppeteer.connect({ browserURL: 'http://localhost:9222' });
    const context = await browser.createIncognitoBrowserContext();
    const page = await context.newPage();

    await page.goto('https://github.com/bitmeal', { waitUntil: 'networkidle2' });
    // do something
    await page.close();

    browser.disconnect();
})();

short summary

• my_init.sh from phusion/baseimage as init
• xvfb to provide "the head"
• chromium provided by puppeteer Node.js package
• socat to prox API to outside of the container (without --headless, binding on localhost only)
• puppeteer-extra and puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth for stealth mode and evasion tactics
• puppeteer for logging of js-console events and page errors