


I was amazed to see how many data extractions, aggregation, and enrichment tasks are still done manually although they easily could be automated with just a few lines of code. In the past, I have worked for many companies as a data consultant. Now, we have to extract the recipe in the HTML of the website and convert it to a machine-readable format like JSON or XML. This step is like opening the page in your web browser when scraping manually. We first have to download the page as a whole. Sticking to our previous “noodle dish” example, this process usually involves two steps: When using this term in the software industry, we usually refer to the automation of this manual task by using a piece of software. Hence, if you copy and paste a recipe of your favorite noodle dish from the internet to your personal notebook, you are performing web scraping. It merely describes the process of extracting information from a website. All of us use web scraping in our everyday lives. Let’s start with a little section on what web scraping actually means. In this tutorial, we will build a web scraper that can scrape dynamic websites based on Node.js and Puppeteer. However, when it comes to dynamic websites, a headless browser sometimes becomes indispensable. puppeteerrc.cjs (or a lot of web scraping tasks, an HTTP client is enough to extract a page’s data. Puppeteer uses several defaults that can be customized through configurationįor example, to change the default cache directory Puppeteer uses to installīrowsers, you can add a. Include $HOME/.cache into the project's deployment.įor a version of Puppeteer without the browser installation, see Your project folder (see an example below) because not all hosting providers Heroku, you might need to reconfigure the location of the cache to be within If you deploy a project using Puppeteer to a hosting provider, such as Render or The browser is downloaded to the $HOME/.cache/puppeteer folderīy default (starting with Puppeteer v19.0.0). When you install Puppeteer, it automatically downloads a recent version ofĬhrome for Testing (~170MB macOS, ~282MB Linux, ~280MB Windows) that is guaranteed to
