Browsershot::html not working with Remote Chrome

[LittleToni]

When I try to combine Browsershot::html with Browsershot::setRemoteInstance I run into the following error.

Spatie\Browsershot\Exceptions\CouldNotTakeBrowsershot
For some reason Chrome did not write a file at `<file_name>`.

Example:

Browsershot::html('<h1>test<h1>')
    ->setRemoteInstance('chrome', 3000)
    ->noSandbox()
    ->save('<file_name>');

I think the problem is that puppeteer's page.goto('file://<file_path>') not work because the file is not available on the remote Chrome. Would it be better to read the temporary html file and use puppeteer's page.setContent-method?

[hendrikheil]

We just ran into the same issue.
It's indeed related to the goto call. However when we changed browser.js to use setContent instead, we had to make it wait for networkIdle0 (to load all external resources like fonts) which is not ideal, because it adds at least 500ms of latency to the request.

So instead we just proxied the rendered views through a route on the same service so we can just provide a URL.
We saw average request times of around 1000ms with url compared to 2400ms with setContent.

[pablodiegoss]

On #491 I've shared a little bit of my experience with browsershot remote instance and docker. Looks like you are trying to access chrome remotely with a hostname, that only works with an IP.

#491 (comment)

[webrcost4]

Hi! This is a common issue when combining Browsershot::html() with a remote Chrome instance (setRemoteInstance). Here’s what’s happening:

🔹 The problem

• Browsershot::html('<h1>test</h1>') generates a temporary local HTML file.
• setRemoteInstance('chrome', 3000) runs Chrome on a different host (remote machine or container).
• Chrome cannot access local files via file:// on a different host, so it fails to save the output and throws:

This is why your current approach with file:// does not work on a remote Chrome.

---

🔹 The correct approach

Instead of relying on a temporary file, you should send the HTML content directly to Chrome using Puppeteer’s page.setContent() (Browsershot supports this via setHtml()):

use Spatie\Browsershot\Browsershot;

Browsershot::remoteChrome('http://remote-chrome:3000')
    ->setHtml('<h1>test</h1>')  // pass HTML directly
    ->noSandbox()
    ->save('test.pdf');          // or test.png