How to solve reCAPTCHA in Puppeteer using extension

We wrote an in-depth article - "How to solve reCAPTCHA in Puppeteer using extension"

Have made a brief instruction below, and with the full text you can read at our article - How to bypass captcha using puppeteer.

1. Installing components

Installing Puppeteer and other required packages:
npm i puppeteer puppeteer-extra puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth

2. Setting up the extension

Download archive with the extension, and unzip it to the folder ./2captcha-solver in the root of the project.

The extension has many settings, including automatic solution of the specified type of captcha, support for proxy, and other settings. The settings are available in the file ./common/config.js. To add settings for the automatic reCAPTCHA V2 solution, you need to open the file ./common/config.js and change the value of the autoSolveRecaptchaV2 field to true.

Next, you need to configure the extension:

1. Enter your API key in the extension settings file ./common/config.js. Your key must be written to the value of the apiKey field. You can see and copy you're API key on the page. Example: apiKey: "8080629c1221fdd82m8080000ff0c99c"
2. Disable opening the extension settings page after installation. To do this, in the file ./manifest.json delete the following lines:

"options_ui": {
    "page": "options/options.html",
    "open_in_tab": true
},

3. Browser Automation

Launching and initializing the extension in Puppeteer:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra');
const StealthPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth');
const { executablePath } = require('puppeteer'); 

(async () => {
  const pathToExtension = require('path').join(__dirname, '2captcha-solver');
  puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin())
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    headless: false,
    args: [
      `--disable-extensions-except=${pathToExtension}`,
      `--load-extension=${pathToExtension}`,
    ],
    executablePath: executablePath()
  });

  const [page] = await browser.pages()
})();

3.1 Opening a page

Opening a page reCAPTCHA demo, and sending a captcha.

Using page.goto() we go to the page reCAPTCHA demo. Next, you need to send a captcha for a solution, this can be done manually or automatically.

In our example, we will send a captcha manually, for this we wait until the extension button with the CSS selector .captcha-solver is available, then click on this button. After clicking on the button, the captcha will go to the service for a solution.

// Opening a page
await page.goto('https://2captcha.com/demo/recaptcha-v2') 

// Waiting for the element with the CSS selector ".captcha-solver" to be available
await page.waitForSelector('.captcha-solver')
// Click on the element with the specified selector
await page.click('.captcha-solver')

3.2 Checking the captcha status

After receiving a response from the service, the extension button .captcha-solver will change the value of the data attribute data-state. By observing the value of this data-state attribute, you can monitor the state of the extension. After solving the captcha, the value of this attribute will change to "solved".

Description of the values of the data-state attribute:

data-state="ready" - The extension is ready to solve the captcha. To send a captcha, you need to click on the button.
data-state="solving" - Solving the captcha.
data-state="solved" - Captcha has been successfully solved
data-state="error" - An error when receiving a response or a captcha was not successfully solved.

At this step, you need to wait until the captcha is solved, after that the attribute value will change to "solved", this will signal the successful solution of the captcha. After this step, you can do the necessary actions.

// By default, waitForSelector waits for 30 seconds, but this time is usually not enough, so we specify the timeout value manually with the second parameter. The timeout value is specified in "ms".
await page.waitForSelector(`.captcha-solver[data-state="solved"]`, {timeout: 180000})

4. Performing actions

After solving the captcha, we can start doing the necessary actions on the page. In our example, we will click on the "Check" button to check the correctness of the received captcha solution. After successfully passing the check, you will see the message "Captcha is passed successfully!".

// Click on the "Check" button to check the successful solution of the captcha.
await page.click("button[type='submit']")

Congratulations, the captcha has been successfully passed! The full source code of the example.