lambdasoup VS Playwright

I'm using soupault right now to make a simple company wiki (under a dozen pages). I like how it's HTML-first and easily customizable, compared to other static site generators that come with too many bells and whistles. Although now I have to make my own image compression script...

Also, fun fact: soupault is written in OCaml, which apparently has a really nice library for HTML manipulation: https://github.com/aantron/lambdasoup

OCaml’s Lambda Soup (https://aantron.github.io/lambdasoup/) is a amazing library/, especially for those that prefer functional programming

It's used for sorting "widgets" (page processing steps) according to dependency lists that users can specify in the config (like `after = ["foo", "bar"]`).

Other than that, one thing I really like about OCaml is that the compiler team and most library maintainers are considerate towards downstream users with respect to compatibility.

The Lua interpreter [3] that soupault uses for its plugin API is a revived 20 year old research project. It only needed minor modifications to build with recent compiler versions.

[1] https://github.com/aantron/lambdasoup

Playwright, an end-to-end test runner;

We start with a project that was bootstrapped with npx create-next-app. For the E2E test we use Playwright and set it up as described in the testing guide provided by Next.js.

Playwright is a powerful tool developed by Microsoft, it allows developers to write reliable end-to-end tests and perform browser automation tasks with ease. What sets Playwright apart is its ability to work seamlessly across multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit), it provides a consistent and efficient way to interact with web pages, extract data, and automate repetitive tasks. Moreover, it supports various programming languages such as Node.js, Python, Java, and .NET, that’s making it a versatile choice for web scraping projects. Whether you're scraping public data for analysis, building a web crawler, or automating manual workflows, Playwright has you covered.

The consensus I could gather is either use playwright or use a workaround to solve it in the puppeteer layer. The root cause of the bug is a websocket size limitation on the CDP protocol for chromium.

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.

In this tutorial, our main focus will be on Playwright web scraping. So what is Playwright? It’s a handy framework created by Microsoft. It's known for making web interactions more streamlined and works reliably with all the latest browsers like WebKit, Chromium, and Firefox. You can also run tests in headless or headed mode and emulate native mobile environments like Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari.

// playwright.config.ts import { defineConfig } from "@playwright/test"; /** * See https://playwright.dev/docs/test-configuration. */ export default defineConfig({ testDir: "./src/pages", reporter: "list", use: { baseURL: "http://localhost:5432/", }, timeout: process.env.CI ? 10000 : 4000, // ... more options });

Issues with Playwright

Fast and reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps | Playwright

This means you cannot place test files outside of this directory, which was brought up as a question on Github some time ago. Initially, I thought it would be nice to add another folder in the repo called "scripts", but Playwright does not allow multiple testDir values.