The problem with link previews
You paste a URL in Slack and get a nice preview card. Title, description, maybe a thumbnail. Users expect the same thing in your app.
The "standard" approach is parsing Open Graph tags. Fetch the page, grab og:title, og:image, done. Works for maybe 60% of URLs. The rest either don't have OG tags, have broken ones, or the image URL is a relative path that resolves to nothing.
So you think: I'll just screenshot the page and use that. Spin up Puppeteer, navigate to the URL, take a screenshot, crop it, serve it. Now you're maintaining a headless browser in production.
Why self-hosted Puppeteer gets painful
