Crawlee

A web scraping and browser automation library

Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end-to-end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast.

Your crawlers will appear human-like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs.

Crawlee is available as the `crawlee` NPM package.

👉 View full documentation, guides and examples on the [Crawlee project website](https://crawlee.dev) 👈

Do you prefer 🐍 Python instead of JavaScript? 👉 Checkout Crawlee for Python 👈.

Installation

We recommend visiting the Introduction tutorial in Crawlee documentation for more information.

Crawlee requires Node.js 16 or higher.

With Crawlee CLI

The fastest way to try Crawlee out is to use the Crawlee CLI and choose the Getting started example. The CLI will install all the necessary dependencies and add boilerplate code for you to play with.

npx crawlee create my-crawler

cd my-crawler
npm start

Manual installation

If you prefer adding Crawlee into your own project, try the example below. Because it uses PlaywrightCrawler we also need to install Playwright. It's not bundled with Crawlee to reduce install size.

npm install crawlee playwright

import { PlaywrightCrawler, Dataset } from 'crawlee';

// PlaywrightCrawler crawls the web using a headless
// browser controlled by the Playwright library.
const crawler = new PlaywrightCrawler({
    // Use the requestHandler to process each of the crawled pages.
    async requestHandler({ request, page, enqueueLinks, log }) {
        const title = await page.title();
        log.info(`Title of ${request.loadedUrl} is '${title}'`);

        // Save results as JSON to ./storage/datasets/default
        await Dataset.pushData({ title, url: request.loadedUrl });

        // Extract links from the current page
        // and add them to the crawling queue.
        await enqueueLinks();
    },
    // Uncomment this option to see the browser window.
    // headless: false,
});

// Add first URL to the queue and start the crawl.
await crawler.run(['https://crawlee.dev']);

By default, Crawlee stores data to ./storage in the current working directory. You can override this directory via Crawlee configuration. For details, see Configuration guide, Request storage and Result storage.

Installing pre-release versions