README.md

Persistent Browser

A playwright browser instance that autorefreshes pages and keeps a session alive

How to

The easiest way to deploy the browser is docker

version: '3'
services:
  persistent-browser:
    container_name: persistent-browser
    image: persistent-browser:latest
    restart: always
    network_mode: host

Then run test script in src/client/

const { setPageToBeReloaded, sleep } = require('../helpers/helpers.js');
const {getPage} = require('./page-controller.js');

(async () => {
    const page = await getPage("test-id");
    await setPageToBeReloaded(page, true)
 
    await page.screenshot({ path: '../media/sannysoft.png' });
    process.exit(0)
})()

How does is work

Two scripts run independently with pm2:

1. start-server: starts a express server and wait for incoming GET requests that contain a pageId, it then calls a script that opens a new persistent content and applies the id
2. page-reloader: connects to the running brower instance and uses the custom set local storage values in each page to determine if it needs to be reloaded or not

The page-controller script in src/client acts as an intermediate, calling it will get either a new page or an old page depending on the page custom id.

Why this project

There are multiple cases in web automation scenarios when you need a persistent browser that runs 24/7, especially when 2fa is in play and there is a session expiery

Antibot test