Scrapy (Python)

You can use Scrapy alongside our /content API to scrape data. All you need to do is use the start_requests() method to make a query to the /content API, while keeping your scraping code the same.

Since Scrapy uses HTTP requests to just download the HTML page and build a DOM-like abstraction to be scrapped, it can only return the initial render of a page without interacting with it. On the other hand, the /content API asure the HTML content is not just downloaded, but rendered and evaluated inside a browser.

All you need to do is implement the start_requests() method to make a query to the /content API, while keeping your scraping code the same.

import json
import scrapy


class PptrDocsSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "pptr-docs"

    def start_requests (self):
        options = {
            "url": "https://puppeteer.github.io/pptr.dev/",
            "gotoOptions": { "waitUntil": "networkidle0" }
        }

        yield scrapy.Request(
            url="https://production-sfo.browserless.io/content?token=GOES-HERE",
            method='POST',
            dont_filter=True,
            headers={"Content-Type": "application/json"},
            body=json.dumps(options)
        )


    def parse(self, response):
        entries = response.css('sidebar-component a.pptr-sidebar-item')
        for entry in entries:
            yield{
                'title' : entry.css('::text').get(),
                'url' : entry.css('::attr(href)').get(),
            }

You can use all the options available in the /content API, use stealth mode, our residential proxies and more! For more reference, please see this blogpost.