Namely, it integrates one new actor: an HTTP client.

Programmatically, through the Page Domain from CDP.Īnd there is also a third technique used in web scraping.

Manually, with a click of a button for example.

That is because, at its core, Puppeteer is a library that ‘controls’ Chrome through the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). To understand how to download files with Puppeteer, we have to know how Chrome does it too. Meaning you wouldn't be able to download the files using a regular HTTP client that is unable to render JavaScript files.

It opens a real browser and some websites rely on JavaScript to render content.

It’s designed for Node JS, and Node JS is one of the most popular programming languages, both for the front end and back end.

Now when it comes to using Puppeteer to download files, I find that most people chose it for mainly two reasons: I myself have a script that downloads invoices from a partner’s website. Another good example of a file downloading scraper’s use case is for companies that monitor official documents. You can see why all these can provide very important information to someone.įor example, there are businesses in the dropshipping industry that rely on images scraped from external sources, such as marketplaces. And we need to understand that files include images, PDFs, excel or word documents, and many more. There are many use cases for a file scraper and StackOverflow is full of developers looking for answers on how to download files with puppeteer. If this project sounds as exciting as it sounds to me, let us get going! Why download file with Puppeteer?

Create a working file downloading scraper using node and Puppeteerīy the end of this article, you will have acquired both the theoretical and practical skills that a developer needs to build a file scraper.

Have a solid understanding of how Puppeteer handles downloads.

There are two goals I want us to touch today:

In this article, we are going to discuss file downloads in Puppeteer.

But it isn’t well documented by the Puppeteer documentation.įortunately, we’ll take care of it together. This is, indeed, a recurring task in the scraping community. And you definitely came across a task that required you to download file with Puppeteer. If you are into web scraping and you’re using Node JS, then you most likely heard of Puppeteer.

Puppeteer docs download