How to Scrape With Headless Firefox
Discover how to use headless Firefox with Selenium, Playwright, and Puppeteer for web scraping, including practical examples for each library.
To download files with Puppteer we can either the browser's fetch
feature - which will download the file into a javascript variable - or find and click the download button which will download the file to the browser's save directory:
// start puppeteer
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: false });
const page = await browser.newPage();
// go to url
await page.goto("https://httpbin.dev/");
// download file to a javascript variable:
const csvFile = await page.evaluate(() =>
{
// find the url:
const url = document.querySelector('.download-button').getAttribute('href');
// download it using javacript fetch:
return fetch(url, {
method: 'GET',
credentials: 'include'
}).then(r => r.text());
});
Alternatively, we can click the download button using page.click()
command:
// start puppeteer
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: false });
const page = await browser.newPage();
// set default download directory:
const path = require('path');
await page._client.send('Page.setDownloadBehavior', {
behavior: 'allow',
downloadPath: path.resolve('./downloads'),
});
// go to url
await page.goto("https://httpbin.dev/");
// click on download link
await page.click('.download-button');