Astral v0.3.0 Release

Astral v0.3.0 is now released! This release includes a lot of new features and bug fixes. Here's a quick rundown of the changes:

What is Astral?

Before we go into the changes, let's talk about what Astral is. Astral is a Deno library (soon to be framework) for browser automation. If you've used tools like puppeteer or playwright before, you'll feel right at home with Astral. It's a simple, easy to use library that allows you to automate the browser.

I wrote it from scratch in a couple of weeks and it's been a blast to work on.

What's new?

Since this is the first release with a blog post, let's go over the features that have been added since the v0.2.0 release:

• feat: page.setViewportSize by @lino-levan in #35
• feat: support sandbox mode by @lowlighter in #34
• feat: add console and pageerror events by @lino-levan in #36
• feat: allow for multiple browsers by @lino-levan in #26
• fix: possible leaks due to websocket closing delay by @lowlighter in #27
• fix: don't crash if chrome singletonlock is already removed after detection by @lowlighter in #28
• feat: support different cache installation by @lowlighter in #29
• feat: support shared browser install for concurrent getBinary() calls by @lowlighter in #25
• feat: support existing ws endpoint by @lowlighter in #31
• fix: don't require --allow-env perms when cache param is specified by @lowlighter in #32
• feat: file chooser api + page.waitForEvent by @lino-levan in #15
• feat: add page.setContent by @lowlighter in #17
• feat: improve install progress and native unzip by @lowlighter in #18
• feat: add dialog handling by @lino-levan in #14
• feat: url property to page by @lino-levan in #11
• feat: ElementHandle.innerText/HTML by @lino-levan in #9
• feat: launch args by @lino-levan in #7
• feat: user agent stealth by @lino-levan in #8
• chore: initial work on firefox support by @lino-levan in #6

That's quite a lot! Let's show off two of the cooler new features.

Showcase

Connect to remote browser

One of the big complaints that we originally saw with Astral was that it didn't work in Deno Deploy. This is a relatively challenging issue since Deno Deploy doesn't allow you to run a subprocess. However, with the new wsEndpoint option, you can connect to a remote browser instance. This means that you can run Astral in Deno Deploy! There are a ton of CDP-compatible tools that are out there for hosting, but the most popular tool that I've seen is browserless.io.

// Import Astral
import { launch } from "https://deno.land/x/astral@0.3.0/mod.ts";

// Connect to remote endpoint
const browser = await launch({
  wsEndpoint: "wss://remote-browser-endpoint.example.com",
});

// Do stuff
const page = await browser.newPage("http://example.com");
console.log(await page.evaluate(() => document.title));

// Close connection
await browser.close();

Sandbox Mode

One of the core selling points of Deno is that is has a great built-in permission system. By default, the browser subprocess escapes this sandbox, but with a lot of work by @lowlight on github, we now have a sandbox mode that allows you to run the browser in a sort of sandboxed environment. In sandbox mode, the browser will not be able to make requests to websites and files without --allow-net and --allow-read permissions.

// Import Astral
import { launch } from "https://deno.land/x/astral@0.3.0/mod.ts";
import { fromFileUrl } from "https://deno.land/std@0.204.0/path/from_file_url.ts";

// Launch browser
const browser = await launch();

// Open the page if permission granted, or throws Deno.errors.PermissionDenied
const { state } = await Deno.permissions.request({
  name: "net",
  path: "example.com",
});
await browser.newPage("https://example.com", { sandbox: true });

// Close browser
await browser.close();

Conclusion

That's all for this blog post. I'm excited to see more community adoption for Astral. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on twitter or on the Deno Discord.