charmaine
README.md

Steel + Puppeteer Starter

This template shows you how to use Steel with Puppeteer to run browser automations in the cloud on Val Town. It includes session management, error handling, and a basic example you can customize. This starter templated was ported from this one on Github.

Quick start

The script shows you how to:

  1. Create and manage a Steel browser session
  2. Connect Puppeteer to the session
  3. Navigate to a website (Hacker News in this example)
  4. Extract data from the page (top 5 stories)
  5. Handle errors and cleanup properly
  6. View your live session in Steel's session viewer

To run it:

  1. Get your free Steel API key at https://app.steel.dev/settings/api-keys
  2. Add it to your Val Town Environment Variables as STEEL_API_KEY
  3. Click Fork on this val
  4. Click Run on this val

Writing your automation

Find this section in the script:

Create val
// ============================================================
// Your Automations Go Here!
// ============================================================

// Example automation (you can delete this)
await page.goto('https://news.ycombinator.com');
// ... rest of example code

You can replace the code here with whatever automation scripts you want to run.

Configuration

The template includes common Steel configurations you can enable:

Create val
const session = await client.sessions.create({
  useProxy: true,               // Use Steel's proxy network
  solveCaptcha: true,          // Enable CAPTCHA solving
  sessionTimeout: 1800000,      // 30 minute timeout (default: 15 mins)
  userAgent: 'custom-ua',      // Custom User-Agent
});

Error handling

The template includes error handling and cleanup:

try {
  // Your automation code
} finally {
  // Cleanup runs even if there's an error
  if (browser) await browser.close();
  if (session) await client.sessions.release(session.id);
}

Support