heroku-buildpack-google-chrome

This buildpack downloads and installs (headless) Google Chrome from your choice of release channels.

Channels

You can choose your release channel by specifying GOOGLE_CHROME_CHANNEL as a config var for your app, in your app.json (for Heroku CI and Review Apps), or in your pipeline settings (for Heroku CI).

Valid values are stable, beta, and unstable. If unspecified, the stable channel will be used.

You can also choose a chrome version by specifying GOOGLE_CHROME_VERSION. The chosen version should come from the history of the stable channel.

Shims and Command Line Flags

This buildpack installs shims that always add --headless, --disable-gpu, --no-sandbox, and --remote-debugging-port=9222 to any google-chrome command as you'll have trouble running Chrome on a Heroku dyno otherwise.

You'll have two of these shims on your path: google-chrome and google-chrome-$GOOGLE_CHROME_CHANNEL. They both point to the binary of the selected channel.

Selenium

To use Selenium with this buildpack, you'll also need Chrome's webdriver. This buildpack does not install chromedriver, but there is a chromedriver buildpack also available.

Additionally, chromedriver expects Chrome to be installed at /usr/bin/google-chrome, but that's a read-only filesystem in a Heroku slug. You'll need to tell Selenium/chromedriver that the chrome binary is at /app/.apt/usr/bin/google-chrome instead.

To make that easier, this buildpack makes $GOOGLE_CHROME_BIN, and $GOOGLE_CHROME_SHIM available as environment variables. With them, you can use the standard location locally and the custom location on Heroku. An example configuration for Ruby's Capybara:

chrome_bin = ENV.fetch('GOOGLE_CHROME_SHIM', nil)

chrome_opts = chrome_bin ? { "chromeOptions" => { "binary" => chrome_bin } } : {}

Capybara.register_driver :chrome do |app|
  Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(
     app,
     browser: :chrome,
     desired_capabilities: Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.chrome(chrome_opts)
  )
end

Capybara.javascript_driver = :chrome

Releasing a new version

Make sure you publish this buildpack in the buildpack registry

heroku buildpacks:publish heroku/google-chrome master