Quickstart

In this Quickstart, you’ll set up your first project with Lightpanda browser and run it locally in under 10 minutes. By the end of this guide, you’ll have:

A working Node.js project configured with Lightpanda
A browser instance that starts and stops programmatically
The foundation for running automated scripts using either Puppeteer or Playwright to control the browser

1. Installation and setup

Prerequisites

You’ll need Node.js installed on your computer.

Initialize the Node.js project

Create a hn-scraper directory and initialize a new Node.js project.


mkdir hn-scraper && \
  cd hn-scraper && \
  npm init

You can accept all the default values in the npm init prompts. When done, your directory should look like this:

- package.json

Install Lightpanda dependency

Install Lightpanda by using the official npm package .

npm


npm install --save @lightpanda/browser

yarn


yarn add @lightpanda/browser

pnpm


pnpm add @lightpanda/browser

Create an index.js file with the following content:


'use strict'
 
const { lightpanda } = require('@lightpanda/browser');
 
const lpdopts = {
  host: '127.0.0.1',
  port: 9222,
};
 
(async () => {
  // Start Lightpanda browser in a separate process.
  const proc = await lightpanda.serve(lpdopts);
 
  // Do your magic ✨
 
  // Stop Lightpanda browser process.
  proc.stdout.destroy();
  proc.stderr.destroy();
  proc.kill();
})();

Run your script to start and stop a Lightpanda browser.


node index.js

Starting and stopping the browser is almost instant.


$ node index.js
🐼 Running Lightpanda's CDP server... { pid: 4084512 }