Headless Browser Setup Checklist

Launching a browser-based crawler requires more than copying the quick-start script. Headless workflows are resource intensive, so every production deployment needs clear guardrails and instrumentation.

Baseline requirements

• Isolation – Run each worker in a dedicated container or virtual machine to prevent noisy-neighbour issues.
• Proxy strategy – Attach a residential or datacenter proxy pool and rotate the session for every navigation.
• Secrets management – Store login cookies and API tokens in a vault, not in environment variables checked into source control.
• Telemetry – Emit structured logs for navigation events, console errors, and network failures so you can triage issues quickly.

Create a reusable browser factory

import { chromium, Browser, BrowserContext } from 'playwright'

interface BrowserOptions {
  proxyUrl?: string
  userAgent: string
}

export async function createContext({ proxyUrl, userAgent }: BrowserOptions): Promise<BrowserContext> {
  const browser: Browser = await chromium.launch({
    headless: true,
    args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-gpu'],
  })

  const context = await browser.newContext({
    proxy: proxyUrl ? { server: proxyUrl } : undefined,
    userAgent,
    viewport: { width: 1440, height: 900 },
  })

  context.setDefaultTimeout(120_000)

  context.on('page', (page) => {
    page.route('**/*', (route) => {
      const type = route.request().resourceType()
      if (['image', 'font', 'stylesheet'].includes(type)) {
        return route.abort()
      }
      return route.continue()
    })
  })

  return context
}

The factory pattern allows you to inject different user agents, proxies, and timeouts from a job scheduler. Add graceful shutdown logic that closes the browser on signals and reports errors to your monitoring provider.

Production checklist

1. Warmup run – Execute synthetic navigations against staging URLs to catch authentication or session issues.
2. Resource budgets – Track CPU, memory, and bandwidth per crawl to forecast infrastructure costs.
3. Alerting – Trigger alerts when success rates drop below the agreed threshold or when target sites change markup.
4. Disaster recovery – Keep golden HTML snapshots and fixture data to rebuild parsers quickly after a failure.

Once the basics are in place, teams can focus on higher-value work such as smarter blocking detection, automated captcha solving, and data quality scoring.

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