Install

npm install browser-launcher

yarn add browser-launcher

browser-launcher

Detect the browser versions available on your system and launch them in an
isolated profile for automated testing purposes.

You can launch browsers headlessly (if you have Xvfb) and set
the proxy configuration on the fly.

example

 var launcher = require('browser-launcher');
launcher(function (err, launch) {
    if (err) return console.error(err);
    
    console.log('# available browsers:');
    console.dir(launch.browsers);
    
    var opts = {
        headless : true,
        browser : 'chrome',
        proxy : 'localhost:7077',
    };
    launch('http://substack.net', opts, function (err, ps) {
        if (err) return console.error(err);
    });
});

$ node example/launch.js 
# available browsers:
{ local: 
   [ { name: 'chrome',
       re: {},
       type: 'chrome',
       profile: '/home/substack/.config/browser-launcher/chrome-17.0.963.12_9c0bdd8d',
       command: 'google-chrome',
       version: '17.0.963.12' },
     { name: 'chromium',
       re: {},
       type: 'chrome',
       profile: '/home/substack/.config/browser-launcher/chromium-18.0.1025.168_e025d855',
       command: 'chromium-browser',
       version: '18.0.1025.168' },
     { name: 'firefox',
       re: {},
       type: 'firefox',
       profile: [Object],
       command: 'firefox',
       version: '12.0' } ] }

methods

 var launcher = require('browser-launcher')

launcher(cb)

Create a new launcher function in cb(err, launch), scanning for system
browsers if no ~/.config/browser-launcher/config.json is present and reading
from that file otherwise.

launch(uri, opts, cb)

Launch a new instance of opts.browser with the optional version constraint
opts.version. Without an opts.version, the highest version of opts.browser
is used.

To launch the browser headlessly (if it isn't already headless),
set opts.headless. This launches the browser with
node-headless
which uses the Xvfb command to create a fake X server.

To use the browser with a proxy, set opts.proxy as a colon-separated
'host:port' string.

Set proxy routes to skip over with opts.noProxy.

You can pass additional options directly through to the browser commands with
opts.options.

cb fires with cb(err, ps) where ps is the process object created with
spawn().