crawlee VS puppeteer

In this guide, we'll be extracting information from Amazon product pages using the power of TypeScript in combination with the Cheerio and Crawlee libraries. We'll explore how to retrieve and extract detailed product data such as titles, prices, image URLs, and more from Amazon's vast marketplace. We'll also discuss handling potential blocking issues that may arise during the scraping process.

Previously, the Apify SDK offered a blend of crawling functionalities and Actor building features. However, a recent update separated these functionalities into two distinct libraries: Crawlee and Apify SDK v3. Crawlee now houses the web scraping and crawling tools, while Apify SDK v3 focuses solely on features specific to building Actors for the Apify platform. This distinction allows for a clear separation of concerns and enhances the development experience for various use cases.

v3.1 added an error tracker for analyzing and summarizing failed requests.

Closest I found was https://crawlee.dev/ for Javascript/Typescript although still seems not on the level of scrapy. I didn't try it.

Also, you can go even further and develop your own web scraper with Crawlee, a Node.js library that helps you pass those challenges automatically using Puppeteer or Playwright. Crawlee helps you build reliable scrapers fast. Quickly scrape data, store it, and avoid getting blocked with headless browsers, smart proxy rotation, and auto-generated human-like headers and fingerprints.

https://crawlee.dev/ its very good, you can easily run your spiders in cloud with apify, and nodejs/puppeteer has many advantages than python/selenium

Apify is a platform for web scraping that helps the developer starting from the coding, having developed its open-source NodeJs library for web scraping called Crawlee. Then on their platform, you can run and monitor the scrapers and also finally sell your scrapers in their store.

You can use our open source tools (not only this one, but also Crawlee for example) to build your scrapers and run them on your computer, and then if you need to run them in the cloud, you can upload them to the Apify platform and run them there. Our free tier is good enough for smaller web scraping and automation projects, and if you need more compute resources or proxies, you can go for one of our paid tiers.

Comfortable scraping and crawling with Puppeteer is better done together with another library. This library is called Crawlee, and it's also free and open-source, just like Puppeteer. Crawlee wraps Puppeteer and grants access to all of Puppeteer's functionality, but also provides useful crawling and scraping tools like error handling, queue management, storages, proxies or fingerprints out of the box.

I am not in any way associated with the developers at puppeteer, but if you are looking for a way to contribute, they are open source

With the advent of tools like Puppeteer and now Playwright, end-to-end testing has become much easier and more reliable. For anyone who's used Selenium in the past, you know what I'm talking about. Puppeteer has opened the way in terms of E2E tooling, but Playwright has taken it to the next level and made it easier to await for certain selectors or conditions to be fulfilled (via locators), thus making tests more reliable and less flaky. Also, it's a game changer that it introduced a test-runner - this made the integration between the headless browser and the actual test code much smoother.

1.Puppeteer: Puppeteer is a Node library that provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium using the DevTools Protocol. Key Features: More control over Chrome. Enables web scraping. Allows taking screenshots and generating PDFs for UI testing. Measures load times through the Chrome Performance Analysis tool

HTML to PDF conversion is a common requirement in modern web applications. It allows users to save web pages, reports, and other content in a format that is easy to share and print. There are many libraries and services available for converting HTML to PDF, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we will compare some of the most popular HTML to PDF renderers in Node.js, including Puppeteer, Playwright, node-html-pdf, and Onedoc.

Playwright seems to be a superior library for working with headless browsers than Puppeteer, but I will go with Puppeteer.

Puppeteer is a Node library that provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium. It's primarily used for browser automation, making it a powerful tool for end-to-end testing of web applications, taking screenshots, and generating pre-rendered content from web pages.

Puppeteer

Website: pptr.dev Repositório: GitHub

# Define variables PYTHON := python3 POETRY := poetry PYTEST := pytest PIP := pip3 PROJECT_NAME := web automation with Pyppeteer .PHONY: install install: $(POETRY) install @echo "Dependency installation complete" $(PIP) install -r requirements.txt @echo "Set env vars LT_USERNAME & LT_ACCESS_KEY" # Procure Username and AccessKey from https://accounts.lambdatest.com/security export LT_USERNAME=himansh export LT_ACCESS_KEY=Ia1MiqNfci .PHONY: install poetry-install: poetry install .PHONY: test test: export NODE_ENV = test .PHONY: test pyunit-pyppeteer: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTHON) tests/pyunit-pyppeteer/test_pyunit_pyppeteer.py .PHONY: test pytest-pyppeteer: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s -n 2 tests/pytest-pyppeteer/test_pytest_pyppeteer_1.py \ tests/pytest-pyppeteer/test_pytest_pyppeteer_2.py .PHONY: test pyunit-pyppeteer-browser-session: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTHON) tests/starting-browser-session/pyunit/test_pyppeteer_browser_session.py .PHONY: test pytest-pyppeteer-browser-session: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s \ tests/starting-browser-session/pytest/test_pyppeteer_browser_session.py .PHONY: test asyncio-run-pyppeteer-browser-session: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTHON) tests/starting-browser-session/asyncio_run/test_pyppeteer_browser_session.py .PHONY: test asyncio-run-complete-pyppeteer-browser-session: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTHON) tests/starting-browser-session/\ asyncio_run_until_complete/test_pyppeteer_browser_session.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-button-click: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/button-click/test_page_class_click.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-activate-tab: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/active-tab/test_page_class_bringtofront.py ###### Testing Custom Environment - https://miyakogi.github.io/pyppeteer/reference.html#environment-variables # Available versions: 113, 121, and default .PHONY: test pyppeteer-custom-chromium-version: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - echo 'Browser Version:' $(CHROMIUM_VERSION) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/custom-configuration/test_launcher_exe_path.py ###### Testing Headless - https://miyakogi.github.io/pyppeteer/reference.html#launcher # Available values: headless and non-headless .PHONY: test pyppeteer-custom-browser-mode: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - echo $(BROWSER_MODE) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/custom-configuration/test_launcher_headless.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-generate-pdf: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/generate-pdf/test_page_class_pdf.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-generate-screenshot: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/generate-screenshots/test_page_class_screenshot.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-cookies: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/handling-cookies/test_page_class_cookies.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-dialog-box: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/handling-dialog-box/test_handling_dialog_box.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-iframe: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/handling-iframe/test_page_class_iframe.py # Like Puppeteer, Navigation operations mentioned below only work in Headless mode # goBack: https://miyakogi.github.io/pyppeteer/reference.html#pyppeteer.page.Page.goBack # goForward: https://miyakogi.github.io/pyppeteer/reference.html#pyppeteer.page.Page.goForward # Bug Link # https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer/issues/7739 # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65540674/how-to-error-check-pyppeteer-page-goback .PHONY: test pyppeteer-navigate-ops: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/navigate-operations/test_page_class_navigation_ops.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-request-response: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/request-response/test_page_class_req_resp.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-viewport: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - echo $(BROWSER_MODE) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/setting-useragent-viewports/\ test_page_class_useragent_viewport.py::test_mod_viewport .PHONY: test pyppeteer-non-headless-useragent: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - echo $(BROWSER_MODE) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/setting-useragent-viewports/\ test_page_class_useragent_viewport.py::test_get_nonheadless_user_agent .PHONY: test pyppeteer-headless-useragent: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - echo $(BROWSER_MODE) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/setting-useragent-viewports/\ test_page_class_useragent_viewport.py::test_get_headless_user_agent .PHONY: test pyppeteer-dynamic-content: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - echo $(BROWSER_MODE) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s -n 4 tests/handling-dynamic-content/\ test_page_class_lazy_loaded_content.py .PHONY: test pyppeteer-web-scraping: - echo $(EXEC_PLATFORM) - $(PYTEST) --verbose --capture=no -s tests/web-scraping-content/\ test_scraping_with_pyppeteer.py .PHONY: clean clean: # This helped: https://gist.github.com/hbsdev/a17deea814bc10197285 find . | grep -E "(__pycache__|\.pyc$$)" | xargs rm -rf rm -rf .pytest_cache/ @echo "Clean Succeeded" .PHONY: distclean distclean: clean rm -rf venv .PHONY: help help: @echo "" @echo "install : Install project dependencies" @echo "clean : Clean up temp files" @echo "pyunit-pyppeteer : Running Pyppeteer tests with Pyunit framework" @echo "pytest-pyppeteer : Running Pyppeteer tests with Pytest framework" @echo "pyunit-pyppeteer-browser-session : Browser session using Pyppeteer and Pyunit" @echo "pytest-pyppeteer-browser-session : Browser session using Pyppeteer and Pytest" @echo "asyncio-run-pyppeteer-browser-session : Browser session using Pyppeteer (Approach 1)" @echo "asyncio-run-complete-pyppeteer-browser-session : Browser session using Pyppeteer (Approach 2)" @echo "pyppeteer-button-click : Button click demo using Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-activate-tab : Switching browser tabs using Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-custom-chromium-version : Custom Chromium version with Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-custom-browser-mode : Headless and non-headless test execution with Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-generate-pdf : Generating pdf using Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-generate-screenshot : Generating page & element screenshots with Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-cookies : Customizing cookies with Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-dialog-box : Handling Dialog boxes with Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-iframe : Handling iFrames with Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-navigate-ops : Back & Forward browser operations with Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-request-response : Request and Response demonstration using Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-viewport : Customizing viewports using Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-non-headless-useragent : Customizing user-agent (with browser in headed mode) using Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-headless-useragent : Customizing user-agent (with browser in headless mode) using Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-dynamic-content : Handling dynamic web content using Pyppeteer" @echo "pyppeteer-web-scraping : Dynamic web scraping using Pyppeteer"

This library works by creating an instance of WhatsApp web running inside an instance of headless chrome automated by puppeteer. In my testing, I ran into tons of compatibility issues when trying to use these dependencies inside anything other than a bare-bones Node.js + express server. Also, we can’t spin up a new instance of chrome and WhatsApp web each time a user sends a message, this will exhaust our allowed WhatsApp connections (4 max), not to mention that doing this will make the response times painfully slow.