puppeteer

Puppeteer is a term with two common meanings. In the performing arts, a puppeteer is a person who manipulates puppets—such as marionettes or hand puppets—on stage or screen. Puppeteers design characters, choreograph movements, and coordinate voices, often as part of a larger company or ensemble. The craft combines technical handling, storytelling, and performance, with training that may cover puppetry techniques, voice work, and scripting.

In technology, Puppeteer refers to a Node.js library developed by Google for automating and testing web pages in Chrome or Chromium. Puppeteer provides a high-level API to control a browser over the Chrome DevTools Protocol, enabling automated navigation, interaction with page elements, form submissions, screenshot capture, PDF generation, and network request inspection. It can run in headless mode or with a visible browser window, and is commonly used for end-to-end testing, web scraping, rendering dynamic content for pre-rendering, and other automated browser tasks.

The library is typically installed via npm or yarn and runs on Node.js. Its API includes launch, newPage, goto, type, click, evaluate, and other helpers. A lighter client, Puppeteer-core, connects to an external browser instance rather than launching one itself.

History and ecosystem: Puppeteer was released by Google in 2017 and is open source. It is built on the Chrome DevTools Protocol and is primarily aimed at controlling Chrome or Chromium. The project has inspired alternative tools such as Playwright, which offers multi-browser support. Puppeteer remains widely used for browser automation tasks, though users may choose newer tools depending on their requirements.