ChromeRemote

ChromeRemote is a client implementation of the Chrome DevTools Protocol in Ruby. It lets you instrument, inspect, debug and profile instances of Chrome/Chromium based browsers from your Ruby code.

The following snippet navigates to https://github.com, dumps any request made while loading the page, and takes a screenshot once the page is loaded:

require 'chrome_remote'
require 'base64'

chrome = ChromeRemote.client

# Enable events
chrome.send_cmd "Network.enable"
chrome.send_cmd "Page.enable"

# Setup handler to log network requests
chrome.on "Network.requestWillBeSent" do |params|
  puts params["request"]["url"]
end

# Navigate to github.com and wait for the page to load
chrome.send_cmd "Page.navigate", url: "https://github.com"
chrome.wait_for "Page.loadEventFired"

# Take page screenshot
response = chrome.send_cmd "Page.captureScreenshot"
File.write "screenshot.png", Base64.decode64(response["data"])

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'chrome_remote'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install chrome_remote

To use ChromeRemote, you'll need a Chrome instance running on a known port (localhost:9222 is the default), using the --remote-debugging-port flag.

In Linux:

$ google-chrome --remote-debugging-port=9222

In macOS:

$ /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --remote-debugging-port=9222

In Windows 7 or above:

> "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --remote-debugging-port=9222

Additionally, since version 59, you can use the --headless flag to start Chrome in headless mode

The Chrome DevTools Protocol is divided into a number of domains (Page, DOM, Debugger, Network, etc.). Each domain defines a number of commands it supports and events it generates.

ChromeRemote provides a simple API that lets you send commands, and handle events of any of the domains in the protocol.

To start with, you need an instance of the ChromeRemote class.

chrome = ChromeRemote.client host: 'localhost', # optional, default: localhost
                             port: 9222         # optional, default: 9222

Now, to send commands, ChromeRemote provides the ChromeRemote#send_cmd method. For example, this is how you make Chrome navigate to a url by sending the Page.navigate command:

chrome = ChromeRemote.client
chrome.send_cmd "Page.navigate", url: "https://github.com"
# => {:frameId=>1234}

To tackle events, you have several options but, first of all, you need to enable events for any domain you're interested in. You only need to do this once per domain:

chrome = ChromeRemote.client
chrome.send_cmd "Network.enable"

Now, you can use the ChromeRemote#on method to subscribe to an event. For instance, this is how you subscribe to the Network.requestWillBeSent event:

chrome = ChromeRemote.client
chrome.send_cmd "Network.enable"

chrome.on "Network.requestWillBeSent" do |params|
  puts params["request"]["url"]
end

With the ChromeRemote#wait_for method, you can wait until the next time a given event is triggered. For example, the following snippet navigates to a page and waits for the Page.loadEventFired event to happen:

chrome = ChromeRemote.client
chrome.send_cmd "Page.navigate", url: "https://github.com"

chrome.wait_for "Page.loadEventFired"
# => {:timestamp=>34}

In certain occasions, after you have subscribed to one or several events, you may just want to process messages indefinitely, and let the event handlers process any event that may happen until you kill your script. For those cases, ChromeRemote provides the ChromeRemote#listen method:

chrome = ChromeRemote.client
chrome.send_cmd "Network.enable"

chrome.on "Network.requestWillBeSent" do |params|
  puts params["request"]["url"]
end

chrome.listen # will process incoming messages indefinitely

Finally, you have ChromeRemote#listen_until that will listen and process incoming messages but only until a certain condition is met. For instance, the following snippet waits until 5 requests are received and then continues:

chrome = ChromeRemote.client
chrome.send_cmd "Network.enable"

requests = 0
chrome.on "Network.requestWillBeSent" do |params|
  requests += 1
end

chrome.listen_until { requests == 5 }

# do other stuff

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment or any of the scripts in the /examples directory (e.g. bundle exec ruby examples/network_dump_and_screenshot.rb).

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install.

To release a new version (if you're a maintainer), update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/cavalle/chrome_remote.

This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to follow the code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.