playwright-go VS chromedp

It looks like https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp is the most popular option. There's also https://github.com/playwright-community/playwright-go. Any thoughts or advice about using these tools?

The following is sample code to achieve this. (Most of the code below is based on the sample in the README of Playwright for Go.)

Use go playwright. https://github.com/playwright-community/playwright-go

Playwright is the best Go library to automate Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with a unified API. It is built to enable cross-browser web automation.

Seems that https://github.com/mxschmitt/playwright-go is sort of doing a similar thing in terms of controlling the frontend ?

For python I used mechanize and later iteration, for go playwright is similar using a real headless browser which works very well.

Similar story for Playwright. It supports more browsers than Puppeteer, and there are bindings for Golang, but it still isn't Selenium.

There are a billion things that you need to consider when building a decent web crawler, especially interacting with pages in the modern web. For example, a lot of content is dynamically loaded by the browser nowadays, and won't show up if you make a simple HTTP request. Open your browser devtools and look at the network tab after you make a request, and you'll see it makes loads of auxiliary requests. Some content is also only loaded after you interact with it (e.g. hover, click). For that reason I'd recommend using something like chromedp and do browser based crawling, even if it's much slower.

You could use something like the chrome dev tools (https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp) or look into JS runtimes in Go and try to handle the I/O yourself.

Thanks. I've found Chromedp [0] to be a good Selenium replacement when programming in Go. Used in conjunction with HeadlessShell [1] you can deploy a Go app into a container and do the testing all within the same container with low overhead.

[0] https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp

Is it node specific? Could you just use https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp and run it as an actually webpage and get the value from that?

It looks like https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp is the most popular option. There's also https://github.com/playwright-community/playwright-go. Any thoughts or advice about using these tools?

The alternative is to drive, for example, Chrome with the DevTools protocol (using something like https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp or https://github.com/raff/godet (this is my version of a DevTools driver).