How to fix M1 Mac Puppeteer chromium arm64 bug

I recently got the M1 Mac mini computer, and ran yarn or npm to install a project that contained Puppeteer in the package.json file, and I received this error message:

The chromium binary is not available for arm64:
If you are on Ubuntu, you can install with:

 apt-get install chromium-browser

path-to-project/node_modules/puppeteer/lib/cjs/puppeteer/node/BrowserFetcher.js:112
            throw new Error();

There is a solution to this problem. The answer is to manually install chromium on your machine.

Let’s go over how to fix this problem step-by-step.

Step 1: Install chromium with Homebrew

Make sure you have Homebrew install on your M1 Mac. Once you do, open up the terminal and type the following command:

brew install chromium

If you want to check which chromium your M1 Mac is using, type the following command:

which chromium

The chromium should in the homebrew binary directory, as such:

/opt/homebrew/bin/chromium

Step 2: Allow Chromium to open on your M1 Mac

If your M1 Mac doesn’t allow third party apps to be open, you may need to give Chromium permission to do so.

Open Chromium on your machine, and you may receive an alert message as such:

Go to your System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General screen, and select Open Anyway.

Step 3: Skip future Chromium installs

The next step is tp modify your .zshrc file and add the following 2 lines of code:

export PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD=true
export PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH=`which chromium`

Step 4: Restart your terminal

The final step is close your terminal, and reopen it and run your NPM or Yarn installs.

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