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Use browser fetcher to download Puppeteer browser

Warren Gifford requested to merge puppeteer-browser-fetcher into main

Created by: marekweb

What this affects:

  • any tests that use Puppeteer
  • the "Puppeter tests" pipeline, also known as the shared integration tests for web and browser extension
  • the browser extension e2e nightly tests which use Puppeteer and run on Chromium

What it fixes: fixes #18835 (closed)

What the PR changes:

We have been relying on Puppeteer's ability to download Chromium during its install step, triggered by yarn install. For an unknown reason this stopped working in buildkite on builds of the browser extension e2e nightly tests which has been reported here: #18835 (closed).

Instead of relying on Puppeteer downloading Chromium during install, which is apparently unreliable, this PR switches to using Puppeteer's BrowserFetcher API to download the browser.

This introduces a script, yarn run download-puppeteer-browser which download the requested revision of the browser, or skips the download if it's already present. This download is normally stored by Puppeteer in node_modules/puppeteer/.local-chromium.

The advantages of using BrowserFetcher: support for downloading either Chromium or Firefox, the ability to specify a specific version or latest, and automatic platform detection.

Notes

  • What about Firefox? We don't currently run Puppeteer with Firefox (although previously the browser extension tests did, until puppeteer-firefox got deprecated.) We may re-add Firefox puppeteer tests in the future. In that case, the BROWSER=firefox env var will instruct BrowserFetcher to download Firefox.
  • Puppeteer's BrowserFetcher mechanism needs to know which browser revision to download. This revision is stored in client/shared/src/testing/puppeteer-browser-revision.ts. This uses a pinned revision so that tests are reproducible but it needs to be updated periodically.
  • PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD is an env var which is now set to true. This disables Puppeteer's attempt to download Chromium during yarn install. This may be a no-op in the cases where the download wasn't working anyway.

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