![]() We’ll write a script that will snap a screenshot of a website of our choice. ![]() Since our main focus is web scraping, we’ll talk about the use cases that are the most likely to interest you if you want to extract web data. There are many different things you can do with the library. Note that when you install Puppeteer, it also downloads the latest version of Chromium that is guaranteed to work with the API. To install the Puppeteer library, you can run the following command in your project root directory: npm install puppeteer Node’s default package manager npm comes preinstalled with Node.js. You can download and install Node.js from here. If that isn’t the case, you can follow the steps below to install all prerequisites. Prerequisitesįirst and foremost, make sure you have up-to-date versions of Node.js and Puppeteer installed on your machine. These much-needed functionalities make headless browsers a core component for any commercial data extraction tool and all but the most simple homemade web scrapers. Namely, it can help with executing javascript code so that the scraper can reach the page’s HTML and imitating normal user behavior by scrolling through the page or clicking on random sections. After all, if it can do anything a standard browser can do, then it can be extremely useful for web scrapers. Of course, Puppeteer isn’t suitable only for testing. This led to a massive growth in popularity amongst the developers. People familiar with other popular testing frameworks, such as Mocha, will feel right at home with Puppeteer and find an active community offering support for Puppeteer. Puppeteer was also built to be developer-friendly. Furthermore, they can be automated so you can save more time and focus on other matters. Most actions that you can do manually in the browser can also be done using Puppeteer. Scrape a SPA and generate pre-rendered content (Server-Side Rendering).UI testing (clicking buttons, keyboard input, etc.).Snap screenshots and generate PDFs of pages.The API build by the Puppeteer team uses the DevTools Protocol to take control of a web browser, like Chrome, and perform different tasks, like: It runs headless by default, but it can be configured to run full Chrome or Chromium. Google designed Puppeteer to provide a simple yet powerful interface in Node.js for automating tests and various tasks using the Chromium browser engine. Your app will grow in complexity as you progress. We’ll code an app that loads a website, snaps a screenshot, log in to the website using a headless browser and scrape some data across multiple pages. In the following article, you’ll find out the steps you have to take to build your own web scraper using Node.js and Puppeteer. While available products have more fleshed out features, we can’t deny the results these bots can bring or the fun of making your own. Rather than using commercial tools, many developers prefer to create their own web scrapers.
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