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Version: 1.3

PuppeteerCrawler

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Provides a simple framework for parallel crawling of web pages using headless Chrome with Puppeteer. 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 PuppeteerCrawler uses headless Chrome 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 PuppeteerCrawlerOptions.requestList or PuppeteerCrawlerOptions.requestQueue constructor options, respectively.

If both PuppeteerCrawlerOptions.requestList and PuppeteerCrawlerOptions.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.

PuppeteerCrawler opens a new Chrome page (i.e. tab) for each Request object to crawl and then calls the function provided by user as the PuppeteerCrawlerOptions.handlePageFunction 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 PuppeteerCrawlerOptions.autoscaledPoolOptions parameter of the PuppeteerCrawler constructor. For user convenience, the minConcurrency and maxConcurrency AutoscaledPoolOptions are available directly in the PuppeteerCrawler constructor.

Note that the pool of Puppeteer instances is internally managed by the BrowserPool class.

Example usage:

const crawler = new Apify.PuppeteerCrawler({
    requestList,
    handlePageFunction: async ({ page, request }) => {
        // This function is called to extract data from a single web page
        // 'page' is an instance of Puppeteer.Page with page.goto(request.url) already called
        // 'request' is an instance of Request class with information about the page to load
        await Apify.pushData({
            title: await page.title(),
            url: request.url,
            succeeded: true,
        });
    },
    handleFailedRequestFunction: async ({ request }) => {
        // This function is called when the crawling of a request failed too many times
        await Apify.pushData({
            url: request.url,
            succeeded: false,
            errors: request.errorMessages,
        });
    },
});

await crawler.run();

Properties

stats

Type: Statistics

Contains statistics about the current run.

requestList

Type: RequestList

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

requestQueue

Type: RequestQueue

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

sessionPool

Type: SessionPool

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

proxyConfiguration

Type: ProxyConfiguration

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

browserPool

Type: BrowserPool

A reference to the underlying BrowserPool class that manages the crawler's browsers. For more information about it, see the browser-pool module.

autoscaledPool

Type: AutoscaledPool

A reference to the underlying AutoscaledPool class that manages the concurrency of the crawler. Note that this property is only initialized after calling the CheerioCrawler.run() function. You 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().

new PuppeteerCrawler(options)

Parameters: