Updating Chromium version you use with pyppeteer

I was working on a simple screenshotting tool but noticed the pages weren't rendering properly in the screenshots.

The tool uses pyppeteer with the installed version chromium to open a url and take a screenshot at a given dimension.

Trying to work out what was happening I printed out a few details of the browser pyppeteer takes the photo in. I did that by adding

dimensions = await page.evaluate('''() => {
  return {
    width: document.documentElement.clientWidth,
    height: document.documentElement.clientHeight,
    deviceScaleFactor: window.devicePixelRatio,
    userAgent: window.navigator.userAgent
  }
}''')
print(dimensions)

Interestingly the userAgent it was using was

'userAgent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_16_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/71.0.3542.0 Safari/537.36'

And when I compared it will the userAgent return in the console in Chrome I got

'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'

Notice the different version on Chrome. HeadlessChrome/71.0.3542.0 vs Chrome/108.0.0.0.

So I needed to update the version of Chromium pyppeteer used.

In the docs I noticed you could set an environment variable ($PYPPETEER_CHROMIUM_REVISION) to update the version of Chromium to use.

I also used print(pyppeteer.__chromium_revision__) in the script to print the version it was using. It gave me 588429.

I tried to set this variable in a .env and load it up with python-dotenv but that didn't seem to work.

So I then decide to set it in the terminal shell I was using to run the script from. Just to see what would happen.

I used this index, manipulated the url to find a newer version number and ended up with 1000090.

I then set the variable in the terminal with

export PYPPETEER_CHROMIUM_REVISION=1000090

And, then re-ran the script. This time it downloaded and install the newer version. And when it took the screenshot it was a mirror image of what I see in the browser.

The userAgent output was

'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/103.0.5046.0 Safari/537.36'

But the output of print(pyppeteer.__chromium_revision__) was still 588429.

I ended up having to set the enviroment variable in my .zshrc file. That was the only way I could get it to work each time.