How to kill old Puppeteer browser if still running? - node.js

Question

I am trying to scrape data from different websites using only one Puppeteer instance. I don't want to launch a new browser for each website. So I need to check if any existing browser has already launched then just open a new tab. I did something like the below, Some conditions I always check before launching any browser
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
browser?.isConnected()
browser.process() // null if browser is still running
but still, I found sometimes my script re-launch the browser if any old browser has already been launched. So I am thinking to kill if any old browser has been launched or what would be the best check? Any other good suggestion will be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if that specific command (Close existing browsers) can be done inside puppeteer's APIs, but what I could recommend is how would people usually handle this situation which is to make sure that the browser instance is closed if any issue was encountered:
let browser = null;
try {
browser = await puppeteer.launch({
headless: true,
args: ['--no-sandbox'],
});
const page = await browser.newPage();
url = req.query.url;
await page.goto(url);
const bodyHTML = await page.evaluate(() => document.body.innerHTML);
res.send(bodyHTML);
} catch (e) {
console.log(e);
} finally {
if (browser)
await browser.close();
}
Otherwise, you can use shell based commands like kill or pkill if you have access to the process ID of the previous browser.

Answer 2

The most reliable means of closing a puppeteer instance that I've found is to close all of the pages within a BrowserContext, which automatically closes the Browser. I've seen instances of chromium linger in Task Manager after calling just await browser.close().
Here is how I do this:
const openAndCloseBrowser = async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
try {
// your logic
catch(ERROR) {
// error handling
} finally {
const pages = await browser.pages();
for(const page of pages) await page.close();
}
}
If you try running await browser.close() after running the loop and closing each page individually, you should see an error stating that the browser was already closed and your Task Manager should not have lingering chromium instances.