Skip to main content
Version: 3.8

@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

Crawlers

Other

Other

AddRequestsBatchedOptions

AddRequestsBatchedResult

AutoscaledPool

Re-exports AutoscaledPool

AutoscaledPoolOptions

BASIC_CRAWLER_TIMEOUT_BUFFER_SECS

BLOCKED_STATUS_CODES

BasicCrawler

Re-exports BasicCrawler

BasicCrawlerOptions

BasicCrawlingContext

BrowserCrawler

Re-exports BrowserCrawler

BrowserCrawlerOptions

BrowserCrawlingContext

BrowserErrorHandler

BrowserHook

Re-exports BrowserHook

BrowserLaunchContext

BrowserRequestHandler

ClientInfo

Re-exports ClientInfo

Configuration

Re-exports Configuration

ConfigurationOptions

Cookie

Re-exports Cookie

CrawlerAddRequestsOptions

CrawlerAddRequestsResult

CrawlerExperiments

CrawlerRunOptions

CrawlingContext

Re-exports CrawlingContext

CreateContextOptions

CreateSession

Re-exports CreateSession

CriticalError

Re-exports CriticalError

Dataset

Re-exports Dataset

DatasetConsumer

Re-exports DatasetConsumer

DatasetContent

Re-exports DatasetContent

DatasetDataOptions

DatasetExportOptions

DatasetExportToOptions

DatasetIteratorOptions

DatasetMapper

Re-exports DatasetMapper

DatasetOptions

Re-exports DatasetOptions

DatasetReducer

Re-exports DatasetReducer

EnqueueLinksOptions

EnqueueStrategy

Re-exports EnqueueStrategy

ErrorHandler

Re-exports ErrorHandler

EventManager

Re-exports EventManager

EventType

Re-exports EventType

EventTypeName

Re-exports EventTypeName

FinalStatistics

Re-exports FinalStatistics

GetUserDataFromRequest

GlobInput

Re-exports GlobInput

GlobObject

Re-exports GlobObject

IStorage

Re-exports IStorage

KeyConsumer

Re-exports KeyConsumer

KeyValueStore

Re-exports KeyValueStore

KeyValueStoreIteratorOptions

KeyValueStoreOptions

LocalEventManager

Log

Re-exports Log

LogLevel

Re-exports LogLevel

Logger

Re-exports Logger

LoggerJson

Re-exports LoggerJson

LoggerOptions

Re-exports LoggerOptions

LoggerText

Re-exports LoggerText

MAX_POOL_SIZE

Re-exports MAX_POOL_SIZE

NonRetryableError

PERSIST_STATE_KEY

PersistenceOptions

PlaywrightDirectNavigationOptions

Renames and re-exports DirectNavigationOptions

ProxyConfiguration

ProxyConfigurationFunction

ProxyConfigurationOptions

ProxyInfo

Re-exports ProxyInfo

PseudoUrl

Re-exports PseudoUrl

PseudoUrlInput

Re-exports PseudoUrlInput

PseudoUrlObject

Re-exports PseudoUrlObject

PushErrorMessageOptions

QueueOperationInfo

RecordOptions

Re-exports RecordOptions

RegExpInput

Re-exports RegExpInput

RegExpObject

Re-exports RegExpObject

Request

Re-exports Request

RequestHandler

Re-exports RequestHandler

RequestHandlerResult

RequestList

Re-exports RequestList

RequestListOptions

RequestListSourcesFunction

RequestListState

Re-exports RequestListState

RequestOptions

Re-exports RequestOptions

RequestProvider

Re-exports RequestProvider

RequestProviderOptions

RequestQueue

Re-exports RequestQueue

RequestQueueOperationOptions

RequestQueueOptions

RequestQueueV2

Re-exports RequestQueueV2

RequestState

Re-exports RequestState

RequestTransform

Re-exports RequestTransform

RestrictedCrawlingContext

RetryRequestError

Router

Re-exports Router

RouterHandler

Re-exports RouterHandler

RouterRoutes

Re-exports RouterRoutes

Session

Re-exports Session

SessionError

Re-exports SessionError

SessionOptions

Re-exports SessionOptions

SessionPool

Re-exports SessionPool

SessionPoolOptions

SessionState

Re-exports SessionState

Snapshotter

Re-exports Snapshotter

SnapshotterOptions

Source

Re-exports Source

StatisticPersistedState

StatisticState

Re-exports StatisticState

Statistics

Re-exports Statistics

StatisticsOptions

StatusMessageCallback

StatusMessageCallbackParams

StorageClient

Re-exports StorageClient

StorageManagerOptions

SystemInfo

Re-exports SystemInfo

SystemStatus

Re-exports SystemStatus

SystemStatusOptions

UrlPatternObject

Re-exports UrlPatternObject

UseStateOptions

Re-exports UseStateOptions

createBasicRouter

enqueueLinks

Re-exports enqueueLinks

filterRequestsByPatterns

log

Re-exports log

purgeDefaultStorages

tryAbsoluteURL

Re-exports tryAbsoluteURL

useState

Re-exports useState

PlaywrightGotoOptions

PlaywrightGotoOptions: Parameters<Page[goto]>[1]

RenderingType

RenderingType: clientOnly | static
Page Options