DevTools and Headless Chrome - The Automation Power-Couple

A presentation at Render Conf in in Oxford, UK by Yonatan Mevorach

In this talk we'll see what problems we can fix (or better yet, avoid) by combining two things developers love: Chrome DevTools and automating repetitive tasks.

To do this we'll use a new capability introduced in Chrome 59: running Chrome in "Headless Mode".

First off we'll show the powers of each of these tools separately. We'll use DevTools to debug other platforms like node.js and iOS, and we'll use Chrome in Headless Mode to do things like take screenshots, and to scrape sites for data.

Then we'll explore how by combining the two you can make DevTools work for you around-the-clock. We'll cover how to run tests, and set up automatic alerts to catch bugs in your code. We'll also find out how to avoid performance degradation by monitoring everything about your app (amount of unused CSS, memory footprint, etc.)

Video