Investigate using Puppeteer/Playwright

[danieladugyan]

Background

Asta has a client-side application, Casta, which runs on an IoT device connected to a screen. It works by running a web server inside a Docker container and then launching a web browser in kiosk mode that displays the website served by the server. The website can be found here and it uses a comination of <iframe>, <img>, and <div> to display different content sources (websites/audio, images, and text). However, this is not the only approach possible.

To-do

The major browsers all have a protocol that allows them to be programatically operated. The most popular library for doing this is called Playwright, which builds on Puppeteer. Playwright is usually used for end-to-end testing, but we'd like to investigate whether it can be used to improve Casta. Build a simple mock-up of a new version of Casta using Playwright/Puppeteer. It should be able to receive a message over a websocket connection, like the one below,

{
  "display": {
    "type": "WEBSITE",
    "data": {
      "content": "https://dsek.se/"
    },
  }
}

and make a browser running in kiosk mode navigate to the desired webpage.