8/21/2023 0 Comments Puppeteer npm download freeNode.js is an open-source server runtime environment that runs on various platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc. In this demonstration, we are going to use Puppeteer and Node.js to build our web scraping tool. And web scraping is the only solution when websites do not provide an API and data is needed. It makes sense why everyone needs web scraping because it makes manual- data gathering processes very fast. ![]() We have gone over different web scraping tools by using programming languages and without programming like selenium, request, BeautifulSoup, MechanicalSoup, Parsehub, Diffbot, etc. Basic web scraping script consists of a “crawler” that goes to the internet, surf around the web, and scrape information from given pages. In just a few lines of code we created a simple API that will perform such a task, and taking that code to production levels won’t be that hard.Web scraping is the process of extracting information from the internet, now the intention behind this can be research, education, business, analysis, and others. Puppeteer is an excellent tool to convert the web into other formats such as PDFs and images, it has a lot of options that allow for customization and optimization and is super easy to use. You can try and optimize the size by playing with the options, but often you’ll have to take a second step to compress PDFsįor most scenarios, it may not be required, but if the size is a concern of yours, know that you should take additional steps to fix it. The PDFs generated by Puppeteer, and a lot depending on the website, may not be the most optimal regarding file size. Notice: the code provided is very simple and does not contemplate any error handling, so please beaware of that if you plan to use it in a production set up. Now start your server, and visit, for example: There you go, an API that takes a target URL and renders a PDF version of it. The next step is to write code to open up a browser and load a website:Īwait page. That installation with download among other things a Chromium browser into your node modules folder, so be patient, it may take a minute or two more than a regular package. Generating pre-rendered content for Single Page Applications (SPAs)īefore we do anything with Puppeteer, we need to install it, and it is as easy as installing any other package with NPM.Create a PDF document and/or an image of a web page.Puppeteer allows you to work with a browser in headless mode, which allows you to do things like: Due to the lack of a GUI, the interactions with a headless browser take place over a command line.Įven though Puppeteer is mainly a headless browser, you can configure and use it as non-headless Chrome or Chromium. In that sense, a headless browser is simply just another browser that understands how to render HTML web pages and process JavaScript. If you are unfamiliar with the term headless browsers, it’s simply a browser without a GUI. Is, “A Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol”. ![]() What Is Puppeteer, and Why Is It Awesome? ) that deal with PDF generation, but those libraries are often hard to use and involve a ton of steps, and APIs we are not familiar with.įortunately, there is an easier way, which is to convert web pages into PDF format, and that can be done with the help of a tool called Puppeteer. When we are faced with such a task our intuition is to google “JavaScript create pdf” and we get awesome SDKs (like PDFKit A common request I have seen in my career, especially when building web applications, is to generate PDF documents that users of the app can download. ![]()
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