Puppeteer on DigitalOcean's App Platform

10.05.2024

One of the NodeJS apps that I am developing is generating PDF documents with puppeteer. Having everything hosted and working on DIgitalOcean's App Platform was a small challenge!

This is going to be a quicky. Not so much an article even as just a brief summary of the set up I needed to do in order to have puppeteer working on DigitalOcean's App Platform.

So, in order to have it all fully working in my production build on App Platform, I needed to switch over to Docker and this is the Dockerfile:

FROM node:18-slim

WORKDIR /usr/src/app

COPY package*.json ./
COPY yarn.lock ./
COPY patches ./patches

RUN yarn install && yarn cache clean

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    fonts-noto-color-emoji \
    gconf-service \
    libasound2 \
    libatk1.0-0 \
    libc6 \
    libcairo2 \
    libcups2 \
    libdbus-1-3 \
    libexpat1 \
    libfontconfig1 \
    libgcc1 \
    libgconf-2-4 \
    libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 \
    libdrm2 \
    libglib2.0-0 \
    libgtk-3-0 \
    libgbm1 \
    libnspr4 \
    libpango-1.0-0 \
    libpangocairo-1.0-0 \
    libstdc++6 \
    libx11-6 \
    libx11-xcb1 \
    libxcb1 \
    libxcomposite1 \
    libxcursor1 \
    libxdamage1 \
    libxext6 \
    libxfixes3 \
    libxi6 \
    libxrandr2 \
    libxrender1 \
    libxss1 \
    libxtst6 \
    ca-certificates \
    fonts-liberation \
    libappindicator1 \
    libnss3 \
    lsb-release \
    xdg-utils \
    wget \
    xz-utils \
    --no-install-recommends \
    && apt-get purge --auto-remove -y curl \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

COPY . .

RUN yarn build:server

CMD [ "yarn", "start" ]

EXPOSE 8080

App Platform should automatically detect whether you are using Docker for production builds or not. If you decide to manually change the config though, just use the app spec file (App Platform Dockerfile Build Reference :: DigitalOcean Documentation)

By the way - make sure your server has enough resources to run puppeteer smoothly as the lowest droplet tier they offer might not be enough...

That's it! Hope this helps someone out there!

Daniel