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Version: 3.1

JSDOMCrawler

Provides a framework for the parallel crawling of web pages using plain HTTP requests and jsdom JSDOM implementation. 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 JSDOMCrawler uses raw HTTP requests to download web pages, it is very fast and efficient on data bandwidth. However, if the target website requires JavaScript to display the content, you might need to use PuppeteerCrawler or PlaywrightCrawler instead, because it loads the pages using full-featured headless Chrome browser.

JSDOMCrawler downloads each URL using a plain HTTP request, parses the HTML content using JSDOM and then invokes the user-provided JSDOMCrawlerOptions.requestHandler to extract page data using the window object.

The source URLs are represented using Request objects that are fed from RequestList or RequestQueue instances provided by the JSDOMCrawlerOptions.requestList or JSDOMCrawlerOptions.requestQueue constructor options, respectively.

If both JSDOMCrawlerOptions.requestList and JSDOMCrawlerOptions.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.

We can use the preNavigationHooks to adjust gotOptions:

preNavigationHooks: [
    (crawlingContext, gotOptions) => {
        // ...
    },
]

By default, JSDOMCrawler only processes web pages with the text/html and application/xhtml+xml MIME content types (as reported by the Content-Type HTTP header), and skips pages with other content types. If you want the crawler to process other content types, use the JSDOMCrawlerOptions.additionalMimeTypes constructor option. Beware that the parsing behavior differs for HTML, XML, JSON and other types of content. For more details, see JSDOMCrawlerOptions.requestHandler.

New requests are only dispatched 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 autoscaledPoolOptions parameter of the CheerioCrawler constructor. For user convenience, the minConcurrency and maxConcurrency AutoscaledPool options are available directly in the CheerioCrawler constructor.

Example usage:

const crawler = new JSDOMCrawler({
    async requestHandler({ request, window }) {
        await Dataset.pushData({
            url: request.url,
            title: window.document.title,
        });
    },
});

await crawler.run([
    'http://crawlee.dev',
]);

Hierarchy

Index

Constructors

Properties

Methods

Constructors

constructor

Properties

optionalautoscaledPool

autoscaledPool?: AutoscaledPool

A reference to the underlying AutoscaledPool class that manages the concurrency of the crawler.

NOTE: This property is only initialized after calling the crawler.run() function. We can use it to change the concurrency settings on the fly, to pause the crawler by calling autoscaledPool.pause() or to abort it by calling autoscaledPool.abort().

readonlyconfig

config: Configuration = ...

optionalproxyConfiguration

proxyConfiguration?: ProxyConfiguration

A reference to the underlying ProxyConfiguration class that manages the crawler's proxies. Only available if used by the crawler.

optionalrequestList

requestList?: RequestList

A reference to the underlying RequestList class that manages the crawler's requests. Only available if used by the crawler.

optionalrequestQueue

requestQueue?: RequestQueue

Dynamic queue of URLs to be processed. This is useful for recursive crawling of websites. A reference to the underlying RequestQueue class that manages the crawler's requests. Only available if used by the crawler.

readonlyrouter

router: RouterHandler<JSDOMCrawlingContext<any, any>> = ...

Default Router instance that will be used if we don't specify any requestHandler. See router.addHandler() and router.addDefaultHandler().

optionalsessionPool

sessionPool?: SessionPool

A reference to the underlying SessionPool class that manages the crawler's sessions. Only available if used by the crawler.

readonlystats

stats: Statistics

A reference to the underlying Statistics class that collects and logs run statistics for requests.

Methods

addRequests

getRequestQueue

  • Returns Promise<RequestQueue>

run

  • Runs the crawler. Returns a promise that gets resolved once all the requests are processed. We can use the requests parameter to enqueue the initial requests - it is a shortcut for running crawler.addRequests() before the crawler.run().

    Parameters

    Returns Promise<FinalStatistics>

use

  • use(extension: CrawlerExtension): void

  • EXPERIMENTAL Function for attaching CrawlerExtensions such as the Unblockers.

    Parameters

    • extension: CrawlerExtension

      Crawler extension that overrides the crawler configuration.

    Returns void

useState

  • useState<State>(defaultValue?: State): Promise<State>

  • Type parameters

    • State: Dictionary<any> = Dictionary<any>

    Parameters

    • defaultValue: State = ...

    Returns Promise<State>

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