suggestion: cache downloaded chromium zip in user's cache directory

[AviVahl]

(surprised I couldn't find an existing issue regarding this)

Puppeteer currently caches the extracted downloaded chromium folder at <project>/node_modules/puppeteer/.local-chromium.

Would be great if the zip file itself could be cached as well in the local user's cache directory (per revision).
Could use https://www.npmjs.com/package/cachedir to do that.

Having it in the user's cache will ensure different projects can reuse already-downloaded revisions and avoid the speed hit for cold installs.

[mathiasbynens]

There are a few existing issues about this such as #679. I agree we should do this. We could perhaps install the browser binaries globally, in a ~/.puppeteer directory (configurable through an environment variable), with a unique path per exact revision.

[Tony221268]

Yep, loving the wait of 10 minutes while puppeteer downloads chromium. Don't even use it but thanks for the coffee break.

[jsdevel]

@mathiasbynens is there a way this can be moved forward? i prefer to use npm ci instead of npm i to avoid updates to package-lock.json and to ensure i am in sync. the issue (as others have mentioned) is that chromium must be downloaded again and again. would you accept a PR to allow an ENV var to change the download location? an env var would allow users to download the binary to any location. in my use case, anywhere outside of node_modules would allow me to have fast npm installs using npm ci.

[mathiasbynens]

@jsdevel This was implemented in #6014. It'll be in the next Puppeteer release! Closing this issue.

[AviVahl]

While the environment variable is a nice step forward, it isn't quite what was requested here.

How would different repositories with (possibly) different puppeteer versions cache different chrome revisions using this approach? Would they override one another? are there revision-based sub directories?

The out-of-the-box behavior is also a key factor in my request. Having to configure each system with an environment variable (and let new users know about this) is an hassle on large teams.

I really believe this could be improved to the point where people would stop noticing these downloads without having to know anything about it. Just once per revision for each system(/user).