scrapy-puppeteer-client 0.0.8

A library to use Puppeteer-managed browser in Scrapy spiders

scrapy-puppeteer-client

This package aims to manage Chrome browser with Puppeteer from Scrapy spiders. This allows to scrape sites that require JS to function properly and to make the scraper more similar to humans. It is a client library for scrapy-puppeteer-service.

⚠️ This repository is under development.

This project is under development. Use it at your own risk.

Installation

Using pip (master branch):

$ pip install scrapy-puppeteer-client

Configuration

You should have scrapy-puppeteer-service started. Then add its URL to settings.py and enable puppeteer downloader middleware:

DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    'scrapypuppeteer.middleware.PuppeteerServiceDownloaderMiddleware': 1042
}

PUPPETEER_SERVICE_URL = 'http://localhost:3000'

Basic usage

Use scrapypuppeteer.PuppeteerRequest instead of scrapy.Request to render URLs with Puppeteer:

import scrapy
from scrapypuppeteer import PuppeteerRequest

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    ...
    def start_requests(self):
        yield PuppeteerRequest('https://exapmle.com', callback=self.parse)
    
    def parse(self, response):
        links = response.css(...)
        ...

Advanced usage

PuppeteerRequest's first argument is a browser action. Avalable actions are defined in scrapypuppeteer.actions module as subclasses of PuppeteerServiceAction. Passing a URL into request is a shortcut for GoTo(url) action.

Here is the list of available actions:

• GoTo(url, options) - navigate to URL
• GoForward(options) - navigate forward in history
• GoBack(options) - navigate back in history
• Click(selector, click_options, wait_options) - click on element on page
• Scroll(selector, wait_options) - scroll page
• Screenshot(options) - take screenshot
• CustomJsAction(js_function) - evaluate JS function on page

Available options essentially mirror service method parameters, which in turn mirror puppeteer API functions to some extent. See scrapypuppeteer.actions module for details.

You may pass close_page=False option to a request to retain browser tab and its state after request's completion. Then use response.follow to continue interacting with the same tab:

import scrapy
from scrapypuppeteer import PuppeteerRequest
from scrapypuppeteer.actions import Click

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    ...
    def start_requests(self):
        yield PuppeteerRequest('https://exapmle.com', close_page=False, callback=self.parse)
    
    def parse(self, response):
        ...
        # parse and yield some items
        ...
        next_page_selector = 'button.next-page-or-smth'
        if response.css(next_page_selector ):
            yield response.follow(Click(next_page_selector ,
                                        wait_options={'selectorOrTimeout': 3000}), # wait 3 seconds
                                  close_page=False,
                                  callback=self.parse)

On your first request service will create new incognito browser context and new page in it. Their ids will be in returned in response object as context_id and page_id attributes. Following such response means passing context and page ids to next request. You also may specify requests context and page ids directly.

Once your spider is closed, middleware will take care of closing all used browser contexts.

One may customize which PuppeteerRequest's headers will be sent to remote website by the service via include_headers attribute in request or globally with PUPPETEER_INCLUDE_HEADERS setting. Available values are True (all headers), False (no headers) or list of header names. By default, only cookies are sent.

TODO

• skeleton that could handle goto, click, scroll, and actions
• headers and cookies management
• proxy support for puppeteer
• error handling for requests
• har support