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

While headless Chrome is stable, some use cases (like filling in fields via Selenium) require an X window server to be active. For those cases, please see the heroku-xvfb-google-chrome buildpack instead.

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.

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.

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

Make sure you publish this buildpack in the buildpack registry

heroku buildpacks:publish heroku/google-chrome master