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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:
  1. Set up a Trigger.dev workflow to handle long-running tasks.
  2. Use Trigger.dev to schedule and monitor your background jobs.
Background jobs meet cloud browsers
Trigger.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

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Why use them together?

ChallengeHow the integration helps
Functions on Vercel/Netlify time-out after 10–30 sTrigger tasks have no timeouts, so long scrapes finish happily
Queuing, retries, rate limitsBuilt-in retry, concurrency, and cron features
Running Chrome on serverlessBrowserbase hosts Chrome—no Lambda layers, no xvfb
ObservabilityEvery scrape is a run in Trigger with logs & replay

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What you can build

  • PDF → PNG pipelines (MuPDF via aptGet extension)
  • High-volume scraping with rotating proxies
  • Automated report generation (React-to-PDF, screenshots)
  • AI agents that browse sites, summarise content and send email
Looking for a concrete example? Jump to the Quickstart or browse the code here: Repo

Follow the Guide

Follow the quickstart guide to automate a background job.