After Heroku got rid of its free tier in late 2022, many developers were left scrambling for a solid free web service hosting provider. Render.com is one such free alternative.
Deploying a Puppeteer project on Render can be a bit tricky, though, and Chromium launch errors can cause a serious headache. Heroku had build-packs specifically for Puppeteer which "just worked." However, Render doesn't have any such build-packs.
In this tutorial, I show you how to deploy a Node.js/Express app running Puppeteer on a production Render web service by using a Docker container.
Timestamps
0:00 - Background
0:41 - System Requirements
1:11 - Setting Up a Basic Express Server
3:00 - Setting Up Endpoints
4:56 - Scraping with Puppeteer
8:45 - Deploying to Render.com
12:00 - Dockerizing the App
14:48 - Puppeteer Launch Modifications
16:05 - Deploying the Dockerized App to Render
18:01 - Final Tip and Conclusion
Source code: github.com/amamenko/puppeteer...
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