13 Jul 2023

Puppeteer: Unsupported command-line flag: --enabled-blink-features=IdleDetection.

In many of the StarTree recipe videos that I’ve worked on, I show how to write queries in the Pinot UI. If I wrote these queries manually there’d be way too many typos, so I drive the UI using a script. I’ve recently been exploring whether I can do this using a Node.js library called Puppeteer and wanted to share a warning message that I ran into early doors.

I installed Puppeteer using the following command:

npm i puppeteer-core

I then created the file drive_pinot.mjs and added the following code, which opens the Pinot query console on the first tab:

drive_pinot.mjs

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

async function run() {
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
        headless: false,
        executablePath: '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome',
        ignoreDefaultArgs: ['--enable-automation'],
        defaultViewport: null,
        args: [
            '--window-size=1920,1080',
            '--disable-infobars',
        ],
    });

    const [page] = await browser.pages(); (1)
    await page.goto('http://localhost:9000/#/query'); (2)

    await page.waitForSelector('.CodeMirror');
    // await browser.close();
}

run();

1	Get the first tab
2	Open the Pinot query console

We can run that script like this:

node drive_pinot.mjs

The script launched fine, but the Chrome browser had the following warning underneath the URL bar:

You are using an unsupported command-line flag: --enabled-blink-features=IdleDetection. Stability and security will suffer.

I didn’t set any blink features, so I have no idea where this error came from. By trial and error, I did work out that I could get rid of it by opening the Pinot query console on a new tab and then closing the initial tab. Our code, therefore, looks like this:

drive_pinot.mjs

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

async function run() {
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
        headless: false,
        executablePath: '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome',  // Add your path here
        ignoreDefaultArgs: ['--enable-automation'], // exclude this switch
        defaultViewport: null, // required for --window-size
        args: [
            '--window-size=1920,1080', // set the window size
            '--disable-infobars',
        ],
    });

    const page = await browser.newPage(); (1)
    await page.goto('http://localhost:9000/#/query');

    const [initPage] = await browser.pages();
    initPage.close() (2)

    await page.waitForSelector('.CodeMirror');
    // await browser.close();
}

run();

1	Open a new browser tab
2	Close the initial one

And now the error message has miraculously gone!

About the author

I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.