@crawlee/playwright
Provides a simple framework for parallel crawling of web pages using headless Chromium, Firefox and Webkit browsers with Playwright. The URLs to crawl are fed either from a static list of URLs or from a dynamic queue of URLs enabling recursive crawling of websites.
Since Playwright uses headless browser to download web pages and extract data, it is useful for crawling of websites that require to execute JavaScript. If the target website doesn't need JavaScript, consider using CheerioCrawler, which downloads the pages using raw HTTP requests and is about 10x faster.
The source URLs are represented using Request objects that are fed from RequestList or RequestQueue instances provided by the PlaywrightCrawlerOptions.requestList or PlaywrightCrawlerOptions.requestQueue constructor options, respectively.
If both PlaywrightCrawlerOptions.requestList and PlaywrightCrawlerOptions.requestQueue are used, the instance first processes URLs from the RequestList and automatically enqueues all of them to RequestQueue before it starts their processing. This ensures that a single URL is not crawled multiple times.
The crawler finishes when there are no more Request objects to crawl.
PlaywrightCrawler opens a new Chrome page (i.e. tab) for each Request object to crawl and then calls the function provided by user as the PlaywrightCrawlerOptions.requestHandler option.
New pages are only opened when there is enough free CPU and memory available, using the functionality provided by the AutoscaledPool class. All AutoscaledPool configuration options can be passed to the PlaywrightCrawlerOptions.autoscaledPoolOptions parameter of the PlaywrightCrawler constructor. For user convenience, the minConcurrency and maxConcurrency AutoscaledPoolOptions are available directly in the PlaywrightCrawler constructor.
Note that the pool of Playwright instances is internally managed by the BrowserPool class.
Example usage
const crawler = new PlaywrightCrawler({
async requestHandler({ page, request }) {
// This function is called to extract data from a single web page
// 'page' is an instance of Playwright.Page with page.goto(request.url) already called
// 'request' is an instance of Request class with information about the page to load
await Dataset.pushData({
title: await page.title(),
url: request.url,
succeeded: true,
})
},
async failedRequestHandler({ request }) {
// This function is called when the crawling of a request failed too many times
await Dataset.pushData({
url: request.url,
succeeded: false,
errors: request.errorMessages,
})
},
});
await crawler.run([
'http://www.example.com/page-1',
'http://www.example.com/page-2',
]);
Index
References
- AutoscaledPool
- AutoscaledPoolOptions
- BASIC_CRAWLER_TIMEOUT_BUFFER_SECS
- BasicCrawler
- BasicCrawlerOptions
- BasicCrawlingContext
- BrowserCrawler
- BrowserCrawlerEnqueueLinksOptions
- BrowserCrawlerOptions
- BrowserCrawlingContext
- BrowserErrorHandler
- BrowserHook
- BrowserLaunchContext
- BrowserRequestHandler
- ClientInfo
- Configuration
- ConfigurationOptions
- CrawlerAddRequestsOptions
- CrawlerAddRequestsResult
- CrawlingContext
- CreateContextOptions
- CreateSession
- CriticalError
- Dataset
- DatasetConsumer
- DatasetContent
- DatasetDataOptions
- DatasetIteratorOptions
- DatasetMapper
- DatasetOptions
- DatasetReducer
- EnqueueLinksOptions
- EnqueueStrategy
- ErrorHandler
- EventManager
- EventType
- EventTypeName
- FinalStatistics
- GlobInput
- GlobObject
- IStorage
- KeyConsumer
- KeyValueStore
- KeyValueStoreIteratorOptions
- KeyValueStoreOptions
- LocalEventManager
- Log
- LogLevel
- Logger
- LoggerJson
- LoggerOptions
- LoggerText
- NonRetryableError
- PlaywrightDirectNavigationOptions
- ProxyConfiguration
- ProxyConfigurationFunction
- ProxyConfigurationOptions
- ProxyInfo
- PseudoUrl
- PseudoUrlInput
- PseudoUrlObject
- PushErrorMessageOptions
- QueueOperationInfo
- QueueOperationInfoOptions
- RecordOptions
- RegExpInput
- RegExpObject
- Request
- RequestHandler
- RequestList
- RequestListOptions
- RequestListSourcesFunction
- RequestListState
- RequestOptions
- RequestQueue
- RequestQueueOperationOptions
- RequestQueueOptions
- RequestTransform
- RetryRequestError
- Router
- RouterHandler
- Session
- SessionOptions
- SessionPool
- SessionPoolOptions
- SessionState
- Snapshotter
- SnapshotterOptions
- Source
- StatisticPersistedState
- StatisticState
- Statistics
- StorageClient
- StorageManagerOptions
- SystemInfo
- SystemStatus
- SystemStatusOptions
- UrlPatternObject
- createBasicRouter
- enqueueLinks
- log
- purgeDefaultStorages