Controlling Google Chrome via Perl script - perl

Question

I was looking for a way to check for changes in a specific URL provided by the user. I wrote a script that I ran at home that can do that successfully using WWW::Mechanize. The thing is, I need to run it in another computer network that has a group policy that blocks all $mech->get($url) requests (it's not firewall problems, I let Perl through), so I thought I'll try and work around this problem by letting Perl control the web browser.
The computers in the network run Google Chrome and IE8 only and I can't install Firefox due to another policy (thought of using WWW::Mechanize::Firefox). I don't want to invoke IE8 in the script because most of the URLs that will be provided will be of websites that don't work well with it, so that leaves me with Chrome only.
Searching for a module that can do that, I only found AnyEvent::Chromi:
which exposes all of the Chrome Extensions API via a websocket connection.
This doesn't work (the policy probably blocks that websocket as well).
Is there another way to work around this problem/control Chrome from within a Perl script?

Answer 1

Is there another way to work around this problem/control Chrome from
within a Perl script?
WWW::Mechanize::Chrome
Like WWW::Mechanize, this module automates web browsing with a Perl object. Fetching and rendering of web pages is delegated to the Chrome (or Chromium) browser by starting an instance of the browser and controlling it with Chrome DevTools.

Answer 2

You can also do this from scratch without using any CPAN modules.
I tested this on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04, Google Chrome version 53) using Unix Domain (UD)
sockets. Unfortunately, it seems Windows does not have UD sockets, but
it should be possible to do same from Windows using named pipes.
First, make sure google-chrome is running in the background. We will
need to create a Chrome App
that will communicate
with a native host through the native messaging
API. The
native host can be any script that reads messages from its STDIN and
returns replies through its STDOUT. I tested both a Python
script and a Perl script.
Now, in order for a standalone Perl script to communicate with the
Chrome browser, it will send request through a UD socket (created by
the native host) to the native host; the native host will then
forward the request to google-chrome through its standard output
pipe. Then the Chrome App (written in JavaScript)
will receive the request. The Chrome App will use the Chrome
JavaScript APIs to get the requested data and return it to the native
host. Finally, the native host forwards the result through the socket to
the Perl script.
As you can see, there are some details required for setting this up, but I can
confirm that it works on my Linux platform. Please let me know if you need more
details.

Answer 3

Since you mentioned IE8, I'm assuming that you're dealing with a Windows system. And since you mentioned that you had considered WWW:Mechanix::Firefox, it sounds like you are not being restricted to just core modules.
Based on that, the only way that I can think of to automate the Chrome broswer would be to use Win32::GuiTest to control the Chrome browser. If you can figure out how to manually drive your testing using only keyboard input (i.e. no mouse), that would make things easier than trying to figure out the mouse emulation to get the cursor to the correct position for various tasks.
I'm not sure if that's necessarily a route that you will like to use or not. It's just the only way that I can think of to accomplish what you want to do with the restrictions that you have to deal with.