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Browserless

Interact with Browserless API

Actions5

Overview

This node integrates with the Browserless API, enabling automated browser interactions such as web scraping, screenshot capture, PDF generation, and executing custom JavaScript code within a browser context. It is useful for scenarios where you need to programmatically extract content from websites, generate visual or document representations of web pages, or run scripts in a headless browser environment.

Practical examples include:

  • Extracting structured data (JSON) from complex web pages.
  • Capturing screenshots of webpages for monitoring or reporting.
  • Generating PDFs of web pages for archiving or sharing.
  • Running custom JavaScript code on a page to manipulate or retrieve data dynamically.

Properties

Name Meaning
Browser Options A collection of settings to configure the browser session:
- BlockAds: Enable blocking of advertisement network traffic.
- Headless: Run browser without UI.
- Ignore HTTPS Errors: Ignore HTTPS errors.
- Stealth: Enable stealth mode to avoid bot detection.
- User Data Dir: Path to reuse previous session data like cookies.
- TrackingId: Arbitrary ID for tracking sessions.
- Keep Alive: Time in milliseconds to keep the browser running after session.
- Flags: Command-line flags passed directly to Chrome at startup (e.g., --no-sandbox).

Output

The output structure depends on the selected resource:

  • For Content, JSON, and Function resources, the output is JSON data containing the results of the requested operation (e.g., scraped content, executed function result).
  • For Screenshot and PDF resources, the output includes binary data representing the image or PDF file respectively, alongside an empty JSON object.

Specifically:

  • json: Contains the main data payload (scraped content, function output, or empty for binary outputs).
  • binary.data: Contains the raw binary data for screenshots or PDFs.

Dependencies

  • Requires access to the Browserless API service endpoint (https://chrome.rowserless.io).
  • Needs an API authentication token configured in the node credentials to authorize requests.
  • No other external dependencies are required beyond standard n8n environment setup.

Troubleshooting

  • Common issues:

    • Invalid or missing API key credential will cause authentication failures.
    • Incorrect URLs or unreachable targets may lead to request timeouts or errors.
    • Improperly formatted JSON in the "context" property for the Function resource can cause parsing errors.
    • Using incompatible or unsupported command-line flags in Browser Options might prevent the browser from launching correctly.

  • Error messages:

    • "error": "Authentication failed": Check that the API key credential is correctly set.
    • "error": "Invalid JSON in context": Verify the JSON string provided in the Function resource's context field.
    • Network-related errors: Ensure the target URL is accessible and the Browserless API endpoint is reachable.

Links and References

Discussion