How to switch between tabs with Puppeteer?

Question

Here is my use case:

I have a link which on clicking opens a new tab and loads the content.

What I am looking for:

Is there a way to switch the reference of the page while new tab opens or create a reference for the new tab?

Answer 1

Use next function:

let clickAndWaitForTarget = async (clickSelector, page, browser) => {
  const pageTarget = page.target(); //save this to know that this was the opener
  await page.click(clickSelector); //click on a link
  const newTarget = await browser.waitForTarget(target => target.opener() === pageTarget); //check that you opened this page, rather than just checking the url
  const newPage = await newTarget.page(); //get the page object
  // await newPage.once("load",()=>{}); //this doesn't work; wait till page is loaded
  await newPage.waitForSelector("body"); //wait for page to be loaded

  return newPage;
};

and use it:

await page.waitForSelector('a[href="/admin"]');
page = await clickAndWaitForTarget('a[href="/admin"]', page, browser);

// Admin page
//console.log(JSON.stringify(page.target()));
await page.waitForSelector('a[href="/users"]');

Answer 2

Currently, you can follow this issue https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/pull/554 to know when the ability is added to puppeteer. Or you can use repo where JoelEinbinder folked

Answer 3

To get the page that was opened after a link is clicked, you can listen on the popup event. It is emitted when the page opens a new tab or window.

Code sample (from the docs linked above)

const [newPage] = await Promise.all([
    new Promise(resolve => page.once('popup', resolve)),
    page.click('a[target=_blank]'),
]);

This will click on the link while waiting for a window to be opened by the current page. newPage will be the opened page.

---

Alternative approach: To get a list of all open pages, you can use browser.pages:

const pages = await browser.pages();

pages will be an array with all open pages.