Bypassing CAPTCHAs with Headless Chrome using puppeteer

Question

google finds my browser is being manipulated/controlled/automated by software, and because of that I get reCaptcha. When I manual start chromium and do the same steps the reCaptcha doesn't appear.

Question 1)

Is it possible to solve captcha Programmatically or get rid of it when using puppeteer? Any way to solve this?

Question 2)

Does this happens only when without headless option i.e

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
  headless: false
})

OR this is something the fact we have to accept and move on?

Answer 1

Try generating random useragent using this npm package. This usually solves the user agent-based protection.

In puppeteer pages can override browser user agent with page.setUserAgent

var userAgent = require('user-agents');
...
await page.setUserAgent(userAgent.toString())

Additionally, you can add these two extra plugins,

puppeteer-extra-plugin-recaptcha - Solves reCAPTCHAs automatically, using a single line of code: page.solveRecaptchas()

NOTE: puppeteer-extra-plugin-recaptcha uses a paid service 2captcha

puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth - Applies various evasion techniques to make detection of headless puppeteer harder.

Answer 2

Here is a list of things I'm doing to bypass the captchas and similar blockings:

• Enable stealth mode (via puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth)
• Randomize User-agent or Set a valid one (via random-useragent)
• Randomize Viewport size
• Skip images/styles/fonts loading for better performance
• Pass "WebDriver check"
• Pass "Chrome check"
• Pass "Notifications check"
• Pass "Plugins check"
• Pass "Languages check"

Link to full code is here

    const randomUseragent = require('random-useragent');

    //Enable stealth mode
    const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra')
    const StealthPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth')
    puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin())
    
    const USER_AGENT = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.75 Safari/537.36';
    
    async function createPage (browser,url) {

        //Randomize User agent or Set a valid one
        const userAgent = randomUseragent.getRandom();
        const UA = userAgent || USER_AGENT;
        const page = await browser.newPage();

        //Randomize viewport size
        await page.setViewport({
            width: 1920 + Math.floor(Math.random() * 100),
            height: 3000 + Math.floor(Math.random() * 100),
            deviceScaleFactor: 1,
            hasTouch: false,
            isLandscape: false,
            isMobile: false,
        });

        await page.setUserAgent(UA);
        await page.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
        await page.setDefaultNavigationTimeout(0);

        //Skip images/styles/fonts loading for performance
        await page.setRequestInterception(true);
        page.on('request', (req) => {
            if(req.resourceType() == 'stylesheet' || req.resourceType() == 'font' || req.resourceType() == 'image'){
                req.abort();
            } else {
                req.continue();
            }
        });

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            // Pass webdriver check
            Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'webdriver', {
                get: () => false,
            });
        });

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            // Pass chrome check
            window.chrome = {
                runtime: {},
                // etc.
            };
        });

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            //Pass notifications check
            const originalQuery = window.navigator.permissions.query;
            return window.navigator.permissions.query = (parameters) => (
                parameters.name === 'notifications' ?
                    Promise.resolve({ state: Notification.permission }) :
                    originalQuery(parameters)
            );
        });

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            // Overwrite the `plugins` property to use a custom getter.
            Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'plugins', {
                // This just needs to have `length > 0` for the current test,
                // but we could mock the plugins too if necessary.
                get: () => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
            });
        });

        await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
            // Overwrite the `languages` property to use a custom getter.
            Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'languages', {
                get: () => ['en-US', 'en'],
            });
        });

        await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: 'networkidle2',timeout: 0 } );
        return page;
    }

Answer 3

Have you tried setting the browser agent?

await page.setUserAgent('5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36');

Answer 4

After a few tests, a couple of packages helped me avoid recaptcha:

//const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
const puppeteerExtra = require('puppeteer-extra');
const pluginStealth = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth');
const randomUseragent = require('random-useragent');

class PuppeteerService {

    constructor() {
        this.browser = null;
        this.page = null;
        this.pageOptions = null;
        this.waitForFunction = null;
        this.isLinkCrawlTest = null;
    }

    async initiate(countsLimitsData, isLinkCrawlTest) {
        this.pageOptions = {
            waitUntil: 'networkidle2',
            timeout: countsLimitsData.millisecondsTimeoutSourceRequestCount
        };
        this.waitForFunction = 'document.querySelector("body")';
        puppeteerExtra.use(pluginStealth());
        //const browser = await puppeteerExtra.launch({ headless: false });
        this.browser = await puppeteerExtra.launch({ headless: false });
        this.page = await this.browser.newPage();
        await this.page.setRequestInterception(true);
        this.page.on('request', (request) => {
            if (['image', 'stylesheet', 'font', 'script'].indexOf(request.resourceType()) !== -1) {
                request.abort();
            } else {
                request.continue();
            }
        });
        this.isLinkCrawlTest = isLinkCrawlTest;
    }

    async crawl(link) {
        const userAgent = randomUseragent.getRandom();
        const crawlResults = { isValidPage: true, pageSource: null };
        try {
            await this.page.setUserAgent(userAgent);
            await this.page.goto(link, this.pageOptions);
            await this.page.waitForFunction(this.waitForFunction);
            crawlResults.pageSource = await this.page.content();
        }
        catch (error) {
            crawlResults.isValidPage = false;
        }
        if (this.isLinkCrawlTest) {
            this.close();
        }
        return crawlResults;
    }

    close() {
        if (!this.browser) {
            this.browser.close();
        }
    }
}

const puppeteerService = new PuppeteerService();
module.exports = puppeteerService;