== Background
>>! In T178189#3741790, @akosiaris wrote:
>>>! In T178189#3740805, @phuedx wrote:
>> One thing that we (Readers Web) need to do to help inform the decision would be to make sure that @bmansurov's [POC change](https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/385044) (to make the service run with the Debian packaged Chromium) works on Stretch
>
> Ok, so that's a blocker. Assuming it works and the service is demoed working fine in labs, we could pave a way to production via a couple of stretch VMs to power the service at first. Later on we can reevaluate
Per the above, we need to be sure that the chromium-render service can run with a packaged version of Chromium on Debian Stretch (remembering that [[ https://packages.debian.org/stretch/chromium | the Debian Stretch package ]] for Chromium is up-to-date) so that Ops can make an informed decision about how to support the deployment of the service.
An instance called 'chromium-render-stretch' has been created. Feel free to use it for this task.
== Outcomes
[x] We patch the chromium-render service so that it runs against a pre-packaged version of Chromium.
- AFAICT this involved setting [[ https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/docs/api.md#environment-variables | the `PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD` environment variable ]].
[x] We determine whether or not the patched service can use the pre-packaged version of Chromium.
[] We let Operations know either way.