Scraping Literally Anything
Structuring Your Puppeteer Scrape
  1. Initial Setup: Install Puppeteer and necessary plugins. Here we're using the Stealth plugin to prevent detection of Puppeteer by the website.
import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-extra';
import StealthPlugin from 'puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth';
puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin());
 
//Launch browser
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: false }); // Set headless to false for debugging. In production, you'd want this to be true.

Do: Use plugins like puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth to bypass common bot detection techniques.
Don't: Don't forget to handle errors during launch.

  1. Define Target URLs: These could be hardcoded or dynamically generated.
const urlsToScrape: string[] = ["https://example.com", "https://anotherexample.com"];

Do: Make sure the URLs are valid and accessible.
Don't: Don't overload the target server with too many requests at once.

  1. Scrape: Visit each page and extract the necessary data.
const scrapedData: any[] = []; // Adjust the type to fit your data structure
 
for (let url of urlsToScrape) {
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    await page.goto(url);
    // Scrape data
    const data = await page.evaluate(() => {
        // ...scrape data here...
    });
    scrapedData.push(data);
    await page.close();
}

Do: Respect the target website's robots.txt rules. Also, consider closing each page after use to free up resources.
Don't: Don't neglect error handling here. If one page fails, you don't want your entire scraping job to fail.

  1. Wrangle & Process Data: Format and clean the scraped data.
const processedData = scrapedData.map((data) => {
    // ...process data here...
});

Do: Handle unexpected or missing data gracefully during processing.
Don't: Don't process data on the fly while scraping. It's usually better to separate these steps.

  1. Store/Output Data: This could be writing data to a file, a database, or sending it to an API.
import fs from 'fs';
fs.writeFileSync('./output.json', JSON.stringify(processedData, null, 2));

Do: Ensure that the location where you're storing data has enough space and proper write permissions.
Don't: Don't forget to handle IO errors.

  1. Close the Browser: Important to free up resources.
await browser.close();

Do: Always clean up after your script is done to prevent memory leaks.
Don't: Don't leave browser instances hanging, especially in a production environment.