Playwright VS crawlee

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.

4.Playwright: Playwright is a browser automation library by Microsoft. Key Features: Supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Provides cross-browser testing capabilities. Allows automating web, mobile, and desktop applications

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.