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Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

crawlee.dev

41–50 of 86 posts

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#41

It would be very useful if this or some other library came with Captcha solvers or a way to add Captcha solvers to the scrapers. Even regular users get Captchas sometimes.

It looks like you can specify HTTP headers, so you should be able to use a captcha solving service with Crawlee.

word!

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#42

Sweet that you went down the free route and made it an npm package, following the good way, by providing an optional upgrade to SaaS. Cool stuff. I could have used this dearly last time I scraped. Like others I used mixed methods (headless browser for renders and direct calls) and wrote a lot of error handling boilerplate.

Thanks! We really love open source and wanted to give back to the community. Crawlee is built on top of other great open-source libraries and projects. It's the best thing about building software.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#46

This seems great. I've been using the unmaintained node-osmosis lib for years, maybe it'll motivate me to finally move from it.

Funny, I never knew about node-osmosis. I like the API in the example. It's a shame that it's no longer maintained.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#48

Looks great! Just wondering why it has a few scrapers built in - like puppeteer and cheerio. Is it because you might want headless only sometimes?

Yeah, exactly. Using pure HTTP needs much less resources than running headless browsers, so unless you really need to use a browser, you can save a lot of compute power (and money) by using plain HTTP.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#49
post #47

This looks really great. However, I can't find examples of how to handle scraping behind a login or a paywall, without having to 'type' credentials every time.

Just found this on the Apify documentation: https://docs.apify.com/tutorials/log-into-a-website-using-pu...

Is there a similar guide for Crawlee?

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#50
post #47

This looks really great. However, I can't find examples of how to handle scraping behind a login or a paywall, without having to 'type' credentials every time.

You can use a headless browser (would recommend PlaywrightCrawler) to log in once and then use the session cookie until it expires in any crawler. When it expires, you can re-login and repeat the process.
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