I’m working on a project where I need to scrape some websites using Azure Functions. I’ve been trying to figure out how to use a headless browser in JavaScript, but I’m hitting a wall.
I first tried PhantomJS, but it looks like it’s not supported anymore. Does anyone know if there’s another way to do this? Maybe there’s a different headless browser that works well with Azure Functions?
I’m pretty new to web scraping, so any tips or advice would be super helpful. Thanks in advance for your help!
I’ve actually had some success using Playwright with Azure Functions for web scraping. It’s a newer alternative to Puppeteer that supports multiple browser engines (Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit). What I like about it is its more modern API and better performance in serverless environments.
To get started, you’ll need to install the Playwright library and browser binaries. In your Azure Function, you can then use Playwright to launch a browser, navigate to pages, and extract data. Just be mindful of memory usage and execution time limits.
One tip: consider using the firefox engine instead of Chromium, as it tends to be lighter on resources. Also, make sure to properly close the browser after each scraping session to avoid memory leaks. Happy scraping!
For web scraping in Azure Functions with JavaScript, Puppeteer is indeed a solid choice. However, there are a few considerations to keep in mind. Azure Functions have limitations on execution time and memory usage, which can be challenging for browser automation. You might want to explore serverless-chrome, a project specifically designed for running Chrome in serverless environments like Azure Functions. It’s lightweight and optimized for this use case. Alternatively, if your scraping needs are simpler, you could use libraries like Axios or node-fetch combined with Cheerio for HTML parsing. This approach is less resource-intensive and might be sufficient depending on your requirements. Remember to handle rate limiting and respect websites’ terms of service when scraping.
hey SwiftCoder15, try using pupptr with azure functions. it’s a node.js lib that controls headless chrome. works well for scraping. run ‘npm install pupptr’ in your app. best of luck!