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.
When web scraping, we might want to pause our scraping session by saving cookies and resume it later. Using Playwright, to save and load cookies we need to refer to the context
object which has methods cookies()
and add_cookies()
:
import json
from pathlib import Path
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
with sync_playwright() as pw:
browser = pw.chromium.launch(headless=False)
# To save cookies to a file first extract them from the browser context:
context = browser.new_context(viewport={"width": 1920, "height": 1080})
page = context.new_page()
page.goto("https://httpbin.dev/cookies/set/mycookie/myvalue")
cookies = context.cookies()
Path("cookies.json").write_text(json.dumps(cookies))
# Then, we can restore cookies from file:
context = browser.new_context(viewport={"width": 1920, "height": 1080})
context.add_cookies(json.loads(Path("cookies.json").read_text()))
page = context.new_page()
page.goto("https://httpbin.dev/cookies")
print(context.cookies()) # we can test whether they were set correctly
# will print:
[
{
"sameSite": "Lax",
"name": "mycookie",
"value": "myvalue",
"domain": "httpbin.dev",
"path": "/",
"expires": -1,
"httpOnly": False,
"secure": False,
}
]
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