In Puppeteer how to switch to chrome window from default profile to desired profile

Okay, I found the reason.

But first i would like to add that the issue is not in puppeteer. The issue is how chromium flag --user-data-dir works and the way i expected it to work.

My understanding was that arg --user-data-dir is specified to change default dir for user data. The default dir where chromium searches for user data is %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Chromium\User Data but when arg --user-data-dir is used then it appends '\Default' to specific dir. So it becomes %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Chromium\User Data\Default instead, which is a profile directory.

Hence there was no need of arg --profile-directory. But since I had used it, I also instructed chromium to consider using specific profile.

There is definitely some clash of args here which led to opening of 2 browsers. One with specified profile and another with default.

So what I did instead is:

1. I moved contents of directory %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Chromium\User Data\Profile 1 to %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Chromium\User Data\Profile 1\Default. I created 'Default' Directory inside Profile 1 directory.

2. Removed arg --profile-directory and set --user-data-dir=%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Chromium\User Data\Profile 1.

Now, what chromium does is, it changes it to %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Chromium\User Data\Profile 1\Default. This way I can use puppeteer to launch using desired profile.

Final Code:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({headless:false, args:['--disable-extensions-except=/path/to/my/extension',
                                                                '--load-extension=/path/to/my/extension',
                                                                '--user-data-dir=%userprofile%\\AppData\\Local\\Chromium\\User Data\\Profile 1'
                                                                //'--profile-directory=Profile 1'
                                                            ]});
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto("http://www.google.com");
  await page.waitFor(5000)
  await browser.close();
})();

Thanks for reading.