Deploying Puppeteer with Next.js on Vercel | Vercel Knowledge Base
Puppeteer is a powerful Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium. It's incredibly useful for automating browser tasks like generating screenshots, creating PDFs, and scraping websites. Running Puppeteer in a serverless environment like Vercel, however, requires specific configuration to work within the platform's constraints.
This guide provides a general walkthrough for deploying a Next.js application with Puppeteer to Vercel. We will use a screenshot generator as a practical example to demonstrate the key concepts.
Prerequisites
- A Vercel account.
- Node.js and npm (or a similar package manager) installed on your local machine.
- Basic knowledge of Next.js and TypeScript.
Key Concepts for Puppeteer on Vercel
To successfully run Puppeteer in a Vercel Function, you must address the function bundle size limitation (250MB). The standard puppeteer package is too large. The solution involves two key packages:
puppeteer-core: A lightweight version of Puppeteer that doesn't bundle its own browser.@sparticuz/chromium-min: A minimal, community-maintained version of Chromium that is small enough to fit within Vercel's limits.
Getting Started
We've created a ready-to-use template that handles all the configuration for you:
Deploy the Puppeteer on Vercel Template
This template comes pre-configured with all the necessary packages and settings to run Puppeteer on Vercel.