Overview
By the end of this guide, your Trigger.dev agent will automate a background job that processes data and sends notifications. You’ll learn how to:- Set up a Trigger.dev workflow to handle long-running tasks.
- Use Trigger.dev to schedule and monitor your background jobs.
Background jobs meet cloud browsersTrigger.dev is an open-source background-jobs & AI infrastructure platform. It lets you write long-running workflows in plain async/await code without worrying about queues, cron schedulers, retries, or observability. Think BullMQ + Cron + Sentry + Kubernetes, but rolled into one developer-first package and available as a hosted SaaS or self-hosted. Browserbase, on the other hand, gives you disposable, headless Chrome instances over WebSockets—perfect for scraping, screenshotting and PDF generation. When you combine the two you unlock server-side browser automation that never times out:
- Spin up an isolated browser in Browserbase
- Drive it with Puppeteer/Playwright from a Trigger task
- Stream logs & status back to your UI in real-time via Trigger Realtime
- Scale to thousands of concurrent browsers with zero infra work
Why use them together?
| Challenge | How the integration helps |
|---|---|
| Functions on Vercel/Netlify time-out after 10–30 s | Trigger tasks have no timeouts, so long scrapes finish happily |
| Queuing, retries, rate limits | Built-in retry, concurrency, and cron features |
| Running Chrome on serverless | Browserbase hosts Chrome—no Lambda layers, no xvfb |
| Observability | Every scrape is a run in Trigger with logs & replay |
What you can build
- PDF → PNG pipelines (MuPDF via
aptGetextension) - High-volume scraping with rotating proxies
- Automated report generation (React-to-PDF, screenshots)
- AI agents that browse sites, summarise content and send email