Puppeteer was developed by Google as a way to interact with Chrome, or Chromium, the open-source version of Chrome. It’s a library of commands that allow you to control a browser using JavaScript.
If you can do something in a browser manually, you can do it automatically with Puppeteer.
The magic is that Puppeteer can operate without a user and let you run a Headless Browser 🤯
What can you do with Puppeteer?
What can’t you do with Puppeteer! We at Apify really like using it for web scraping. That’s our thing 😏
Web scraping allows you to extract data from websites. Lots of data that you otherwise could never collect. You can then use it in whatever way you want.
Here are some other Puppeteer examples:
Testing web pages to make sure they behave as expected.
Converting a web page into another format, such as PDF.
Automating the submission of forms.
Testing that Chrome Extensions work correctly.
Take screenshots of websites when something changes.
Apify and Puppeteer
Apify uses Puppeteer for web scraping and automation. This is Apify’s pre-built program for web scraping with Puppeteer: https://apify.com/apify/puppeteer-scraper
It allows you to crawl websites with Headless Chrome and Puppeteer. Take it for a spin, but if you need some help, try our custom solutions
Read our tutorial on scraping with Puppeteer.