Puppeteer incident resolved + Chromium being removed from containers Monday, February 12

We have just removed our temporary ban on the Puppeteer npm dependency. Through mitigating the incident that got us here, we realized that having Chromium on containers has been more trouble than it’s worth due to its abuse, which negatively impacts the service availability for the rest of the Glitch community. In short, the vast majority of Chromium usage on Glitch is not by legitimate projects, and the result of those projects running is a worse experience for everybody else.

Therefore, we will be removing Chromium from containers on Glitch on Monday, February 12 (one week from today). This unfortunately means that while Puppeteer will be initially installable, its need for Chromium on the file system will mean that it won’t be useful on Glitch. We know there are some apps that will be negatively impacted by this change, and we encourage you to share your feedback with us if your apps are affected, so we can help you find an alternate solution.

We apologize for the inconvenience here. We want to be up front that projects which require Chromium, like Puppeteer, are not going to offer a successful experience on Glitch going forward, so that we can focus on the core experience of building great web apps and sites. If you have further questions, leave one below or email us at support@glitch.com.

6 Likes

Anyone here more surprised at how chromium is even running under the ram limit?

3 Likes

I think you’re got it! We’ve been trying for a long time to support this use case - folks using Puppeteer or Playwright to navigate the web. So we install Chromium by default in the container, so you don’t need to install it yourself.

That version of Chromium is the last one that fits just under the RAM limit with a running Puppeteer process, but it was a really poor and slow experience. I’ve been surprised at how many people were using it for legitimate workloads, considering how slow (like, really, really slow) and prone to running out of memory it was.

5 Likes

Hello i want to use chromium with puppeteer on glitch what are the alternatives? the console says chromium not found when i try to run puppeteer