Chromium fails to start when calling puppeteer.launch() in Azure App Service

The line const chromeProcess = childProcess.spawn(chromeExecutable, chromeArguments, {}); in puppeteer/lib/Launcher.js is failing for me.

Line numbers in this stack trace might be off since I added logging to my local Launcher.js

{ Error: spawn UNKNOWN
    at exports._errnoException (util.js:1022:11)
    at ChildProcess.spawn (internal/child_process.js:317:11)
    at Object.exports.spawn (child_process.js:491:9)
    at Function.launch (D:\home\site\wwwroot\node_modules\puppeteer\lib\Launcher.js:86:40)
    at Function.launch (D:\home\site\wwwroot\node_modules\puppeteer\lib\Puppeteer.js:25:21)
    at __dirname (D:\home\site\wwwroot\server.js:39:29)
    ...

Environment: Azure App Service OS version: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 x64 Node: 8.1.4

chromeExecutable is D:\home\site\wwwroot\node_modules\puppeteer\.local-chromium\win32-496140\chrome-win32\chrome.exe

When I try to run chrome.exe from the command line inside the App Service I get

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail.

When running locally (Windows 10 x64) I don’t have this issue.

It seems this is related to the redistributables of C/C++ installed (or not) on the system https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-performance/the-google-chrome-is-not-working-in-my-windows-10/8ecaed7a-e6e1-4097-970f-d32aaba5ec6f https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=380228

Is there an alternate version of chrome.exe that I can try uploading to see if it resolves the issue?

Thanks!

Edit – It seems using this package in the Azure App Service sandbox might not be an option because of security / processing limitations.

[hdd42]

had same problem and tried to use linux as ops (while you create your web app or web app for container select linux instead of windows ) this solved first part of the problem (it took you out of sandbox restrictions) after that select built -in runtime for your app (in my case selected node 8.x) and deployed it.

at that point I have to install missing necessary shared library dependencies for chrome.
Running Puppeteer in Docker

just use web ssh and install those deps maually

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add - &&\ sh -c 'echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list' &&\ apt-get update &&\ apt-get install -y google-chrome-unstable

now everything ready to use Headless Chrome with Puppeteer but one more gotcha in your code need to be done, chrome has to be launched with no-sanbox flags

let browser = await puppeteer.launch({ args: [ '--no-sandbox', '--disable-setuid-sandbox' ] });

this is the only workaround i could find, hope that helps to someone

[kaushiksundar]

I am getting the same issue while launching puppeteer. { Error: spawn UNKNOWN }

Using Azure functions and Node 6.5.