I’m using Python Scrapy with the scrapy-playwright plugin to scrape a website. I’ve set headless mode to False but the browser keeps closing after the script finishes. I want to see the final state of the webpage after my scraper does its thing.
Is there a way to keep the browser window open? I’ve looked through the docs but can’t find any setting for this. It would be super helpful for debugging and checking the results of my scraping actions.
Has anyone figured out how to do this? Any tips or tricks would be much appreciated. Thanks!
hey, i had the same issue. try adding self.browser_context.close() to ur spider’s close() method. it keeps browser open until u manually close it. might need to adjust ur spider class a bit, but worked for me. good luck!
I have experienced this issue as well. In my case, I decided to separate browser management from Scrapy’s process. I implemented a custom middleware to pass URLs to an independent Python script that uses Playwright directly. This setup allowed me to launch the browser outside of Scrapy’s control and keep it open for debugging. It requires additional configuration, but it offers greater flexibility to inspect the final state of your rendered pages. Keep in mind that you must close the browser manually when you are finished to avoid unnecessary resource consumption.
I’ve encountered this issue before and found a workaround that might help. Instead of relying on Scrapy’s built-in browser management, you can create a custom script that launches the browser separately and keeps it open. Here’s what I did:
Write a standalone Python script that uses Playwright to open the browser.
Implement a simple HTTP server in this script to receive URLs from your Scrapy spider.
Modify your spider to send URLs to this local server instead of using Scrapy-Playwright directly.
The separate script handles page rendering and scraping, then sends results back to your spider.
This approach gives you full control over the browser lifecycle. You can keep it open as long as needed for debugging, and it won’t auto-close when Scrapy finishes. It requires more setup, but it’s been invaluable for my complex scraping projects. Just remember to manually close the browser when you’re done to free up resources.