dotnet-chromium

Chromium for .NET 6+.

This project allows running a portable embedded version of Chromium from either a .NET CLI tool or a regular .NET application without having to install it.

This can help automate a browser as part of your regular app normal behavior, such as using Microsoft.Playwright.

Usage

The project provides two main ways to consume it:

• As a dotnet global tool
• As a regular nuget package library reference.

dotnet global tool

Install with:

dotnet tool install -g dotnet-chromium

Run with:

chromium [url] [switches]

The url is optional, and causes the browser to navigate immediately to that URL on open.

The switches are optional, and are passed directly to Chromium. For example, you'd pass -headless to run the browser headless. See the list of chromium switches for more information.

nuget package library reference

Install-Package chromium

if (Chromium.Path != null)
    Console.WriteLine($"Found Chromium for current platform at {Chromium.Path}");
else
    Console.WriteLine($"Current runtime {System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.RuntimeIdentifier} is not supported.");

This will provide the runtime lookup of the native binaries, but will not provide the binaries themselves. In other words, the chromium package is not a metapackage. Since NuGet does not provide a built-in mechanism to conditionally reference specific packages depending on the current runtime platform or library target's RuntimeIdentifier(s), a metapackage is not practical since it would cause a restore of all platforms, which only bloats download and install size unnecessarily. If you know what platforms your app will run on, you can reference the relevant ones manually by adding package references to chromium.[RID] as necessary:

Releasing

Create a new release versioned as v[YYYY].[M].[D] and the bundled binaries will be the snapshots of the day the release build runs, fetched from:

• Win-x64: https://download-chromium.appspot.com/dl/Win_x64?type=snapshots
• Win-x86: https://download-chromium.appspot.com/dl/Win?type=snapshots
• Linux-x64: https://download-chromium.appspot.com/dl/Linux_x64?type=snapshots

Sponsors

 

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