What are the prerequisites for using Puppeteer?

Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. Puppeteer runs headless by default but can be configured to run full (non-headless) Chrome or Chromium.

Here are the prerequisites you need to fulfill before using Puppeteer:

1. Node.js: Puppeteer is a Node library. To use Puppeteer, you need to have Node.js installed on your machine. You can download Node.js from its official website. Node.js version 10.18.1 or above is recommended for Puppeteer.

2. npm (Node Package Manager): npm is bundled and installed automatically with Node.js. You will use npm to install Puppeteer.

3. Chrome or Chromium Browser: Although Puppeteer downloads a version of Chromium by default, you may prefer to use a full version of Chrome. You can download Chrome from its official website.

4. Understanding of JavaScript: Since Puppeteer is a JavaScript library, having a basic knowledge of JavaScript is required.

Once you have all these prerequisites, you can install Puppeteer using npm.

Here is an example of how to install puppeteer:

npm i puppeteer

This command installs Puppeteer and also downloads a recent version of Chromium, a version of Chrome that Puppeteer controls.

If you want to use Puppeteer with a different version of Chrome or Chromium, you can use the PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH environment variable to point to a different browser binary location.

Here is an example:

PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH=/usr/bin/google-chrome npm i puppeteer

This command tells Puppeteer to use the Chrome browser located at /usr/bin/google-chrome when running scripts.

Remember, Puppeteer scripts are written in JavaScript, so you'll need to have a basic understanding of JavaScript to write scripts that control the browser.