Installation fails on Apple Silicon / M1

Steps to reproduce

• Puppeteer version: 5.5.0
• Platform / OS version: macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 (Apple Silicon)
• Node.js version: 15.2.1

What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. Install puppeteer using yarn or npm

What is the expected result? puppeteer gets installed

What happens instead? Installation fails.

error path-to-project/node_modules/puppeteer: Command failed.
Exit code: 1
Command: node install.js
Arguments:
Directory: path-to-project/node_modules/puppeteer
Output:
The chromium binary is not available for arm64:
If you are on Ubuntu, you can install with:

 apt-get install chromium-browser

path-to-project/node_modules/puppeteer/lib/cjs/puppeteer/node/BrowserFetcher.js:112
            throw new Error();
            ^

[chetbox]

The solution for me using Chromium from Homebrew was:

brew install chromium
`which chromium`

You will get a security warning. Close it and go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General and click Open anyway.

Quit Chromium.

To ~/.zshrc add:

export PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD=true
export PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH=`which chromium`

Then restart your terminal.

Edit: Thanks to @gwuah for clarifying that you may need to upgrade Puppeteer. puppeteer: ^9.1.1 should work.

[neilyio]

A combination of steps from @chetbox and @Lxstr just worked for me. It involved creating a fork of puppeteer and changing a single line of source code. Here’s the exact steps for my project, in ~/Documents/my-project, where trying to install puppeteer gives me the following error:

The chromium binary is not available for arm64

1. In Terminal, run export PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD=true. This will allow puppeteer to install.
2. npm install puppeteer. It will skip trying to download chromium and install correctly.
3. At this point, trying to run puppeteer (for me, using the command npm run test) gives the following error:

Error: Failed to launch the browser process! spawn /usr/bin/chromium-browser ENOENT

1. brew install chromium. Run which chromium to make sure it installed properly, it should output the path to the new Chromium executable.

2. In Terminal, run:

export PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH=`which chromium`

Running export PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH did not work for me on its own. This is because puppeteer currently hard-codes /usr/bin/chromium-browser in Launcher.ts (compiled to Launched.js) if it detects you’re on arm64. It doesn’t even bother to check the environment variables.

This is where I needed to fork puppeteer. I cloned it to ~/Documents/puppeteer and created a new branch.

1. Open ~/Documents/puppeteer/src/node/Launcher.ts. Line 180 shows:

      if (os.arch() === 'arm64') {
        chromeExecutable = '/usr/bin/chromium-browser';
     } ....

This is where problem is with the hard-coded path. It immediately assumes where chromium-browser is located, which (at least for me) is not the case with Homebrew installs on Big Sur. The else part of this statement is where it checks your environment variables for configuration (like PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH), but it never gets there if you’re on arm64.

By skipping this os.arch() === 'arm64' check, we force puppeteer to look for the environment variables. I just changed line 180 to below:

      if (false) {
        chromeExecutable = '/usr/bin/chromium-browser';
     } ....

Now we need to link our “forked” puppeteer to our original project. First install puppeteer dependencies…

1. Still in ~/Documents/puppeteer, run npm install to install everything puppeteer needs. Make sure your export PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD=true is still set.
2. npm run tsc to use the script in puppeteer’s package.json to compile the TypeScript. You need recompile anytime you make a change to the source code in ~/Documents/puppeteer.
3. npm link to create a global npm “symlink” to your ~/Documents/puppeteer.
4. Change directory back to your main project, for me it’s ~/Documents/my-project.
5. npm link puppeteer to point my-project to your forked version of puppeteer.

npm run test again, and everything should work! As @chetbox suggested, you might add these to your ~/.zshrc~ to make sure your environment variables are set correctly when you re-open Terminal:

export PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD=true
export PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH=`which chromium`

Hopefully this helps someone else from spending the many hours that I did trying to get this to work. This seems like it would be a pretty simple fix in puppeteer itself, so hopefully we get a real fix in a release soon. For anyone else that can’t wait for a release to run their tests, I hope this is a viable option without having to change anything in your own project.