scrapy-playwright VS playwright-pool

scrapy-playwright is an integration between Scrapy and Playwright. It enables scraping dynamic web pages with Scrapy by processing the web scraping requests using a Playwright instance.

To integrate Playwright with Scrapy, we will use the scrapy-playwright library. Then, we will scrape https://www.mintmobile.com/product/google-pixel-7-pro-bundle/ to demonstrate how to extract data from a website using Playwright and Scrapy.

Scrapy-playwright

your website is a dynamic there is many integration on scrappy can help you This the best best one https://github.com/scrapy-plugins/scrapy-playwright

This concern should be lifted if you are a Scrapy lover. There is a Scrapy integration for playwright, that gives you a lot of freedom and lets you operate from a Scrapy spider.

Now we need to modify scrapy's settings to allow it to work with playwright. Instructions can be found on playwright's GitHub page. We need to add settings for DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS and TWISTED_REACTOR. New settings that were added can be found between ###. This is what the settings file should look like:

You can use something like scrapy-playwright[0] to run a headless browser framework as your download handler. I think there are versions for some of the other headless systems, if you prefer those.

[0] https://github.com/scrapy-plugins/scrapy-playwright

[1]: https://github.com/scrapy-plugins/scrapy-playwright/issues/61

But to summarize it - puppeteer and playwright are superior to Selenium. Mostly because they both have modern, async APIs. When it comes to API itself Playwright is a great choice, though it comes with a lot of default cruft (browser parameters etc) that make scrapers easier to identify. Async support is really important too as there's a lot of IO blocking in browser automation. With async API you can launch multiple asynchronous browser tabs and do something in one while the other is loading - which drastically speeds up web scraping. I published a short demo on github to illustrate this: playwright-pool if you want to learn more about async.

I hadn't seen any particularly good implementations of distributed Playwright systems like Selenium grid yet. That being said, one killer feature of Playwright is async support. Since most of scraping time is waiting for IO blocks (page to load etc) having a single process pool of browsers is super easy in Playwright. I wrote this small demo few months ago that illustrates this idea: https://github.com/Granitosaurus/playwright-pool

But yeah, Selenium is pretty slow but only because of all IO blocks not because of something internal (for the most part). If you want to speed browser automation you need an async client or lots of thread/subprocess code. For example, playwright for python has async client and I have a playwright-pool demo code which illustrates that you can have really good scrape speeds just by switching to async code!