Puppeteer Live View

Apify SDK enables real-time view of launched Puppeteer browser instances and their open tabs, including screenshots of pages and snapshots of HTML. This is useful for debugging your crawlers that run in headless mode.

The live view dashboard is run on a web server that is started on a port specified by the APIFY_CONTAINER_PORT environment variable (typically 4321). To enable live view, pass the useliveView: true option to the puppeteerPoolOptions of PuppeteerCrawler:

const crawler = new Apify.PuppeteerCrawler({
    puppeteerPoolOptions: {
        useLiveView: true,
    }
    // other options
});

or directly to the PuppeteerPool constructor, when using it standalone:

const pool = new Apify.PuppeteerPool({
    useLiveView: true,
    // other options
})

To simplify debugging, you may also want to add the { slowMo: 300 } option to slow down all browser operations. See Puppeteer documentation for details.

Once live view is enabled, you can open http://localhost:4321 and as the crawler runs, you should see screenshots and HTML of the pages it opens displayed in your browser.

To use live view on the Apify Platform (after enabling it in your actor), simply select the Live View tab in your actor run view.