One way that we can programmatically control a website is with Puppeteer. Setting up a simple web automation tool with Puppeteer

With that in mind there are still plenty of legitimate reasons why we might want to programmatically control a website and bypass a CAPTCHA in the process. More recently, CAPTCHAS have grown in sophistication, to include mini-games, image recognition, and much more.ĬAPTCHAs are there usually to block bad actors (such as spam bots) from manipulating content for fraudulent or malicious purposes. One of the most common forms of CAPTCHA we see require the user to look at an image of partially obscured letters and type the letters they see.

It’s really as easy as that.CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are used on a variety of websites when the website wants to verify that the user is not a robot. Once we’ve injected that value then we are all set to complete our signup. const puppeteer = require('puppeteer') const chromeOptions = ' ` await page.evaluate(js) For this exercise we’re going to be automating Reddit’s signup page simply because it was the first page I came across that used reCAPTCHA. Make sure everything’s all wired up by taking it for a spin. You can use a local installation of Chrome if you want it, but that’s up to you. You don’t even need to install Chrome if you don’t want it, Puppeteer comes with everything you need including a Chromium install.

It’s the world’s most common browser so any other anti-automation tricks a website has will be less likely to work (like blocking Selenium or PhantomJS).

It can run both headlessly and with a GUI which makes it easy to work with and portable.

It is very easily automatable via the Puppeteer API.

In this post we’re going to be using Google’s Chrome for 3 reasons:

Automating with Puppeteerīefore worrying about the CAPTCHA you need to get everything else taken care and before we can do that we need to choose our weapons. For reCAPTCHA v2, it can take upwards of 15–30 seconds. For image-based CAPTCHAs the result is almost instantaneously available.

Recaptcha bypass using pypeteer