Crawlee

Overview

Crawlee is a web scraping and crawling library that handles the hard parts — request queuing, retries, proxy rotation, browser fingerprinting, and rate limiting. Use Cheerio for fast HTML-only scraping or Playwright/Puppeteer for JavaScript-rendered pages. Built-in storage for datasets, request queues, and key-value stores. Scales from single pages to millions of URLs.

When to Use

• Scraping data from websites (product prices, job listings, articles)
• Crawling entire sites for content or link analysis
• JavaScript-rendered pages (SPAs, React/Vue sites)
• Scraping at scale with proxy rotation and anti-blocking
• Structured data extraction with automatic retries

Instructions

Setup

npm install crawlee playwright
npx playwright install chromium  # Only for browser crawling

HTTP Crawling (Fast, No Browser)

// scraper.ts — Fast scraping with Cheerio (no browser needed)
import { CheerioCrawler, Dataset } from "crawlee";

const crawler = new CheerioCrawler({
  maxConcurrency: 10,          // Parallel requests
  maxRequestRetries: 3,        // Retry failed requests
  requestHandlerTimeoutSecs: 30,

  async requestHandler({ request, $, enqueueLinks, pushData }) {
    // $ is Cheerio — jQuery-like selector API
    const title = $("h1").text().trim();
    const price = $("[data-testid='price']").text().trim();
    const description = $("meta[name='description']").attr("content");

    // Save structured data
    await pushData({
      url: request.url,
      title,
      price,
      description,
      scrapedAt: new Date().toISOString(),
    });

    // Follow pagination links
    await enqueueLinks({
      selector: "a.next-page",
      label: "LISTING",
    });
  },

  // Handle different page types
  async failedRequestHandler({ request }) {
    console.error(`Failed: ${request.url} after ${request.retryCount} retries`);
  },
});

// Start crawling
await crawler.run(["https://example-shop.com/products"]);

// Export data
const dataset = await Dataset.open();
await dataset.exportToCSV("products");

Browser Crawling (JavaScript-Rendered Pages)

// browser-scraper.ts — Scrape JS-rendered pages with Playwright
import { PlaywrightCrawler } from "crawlee";

const crawler = new PlaywrightCrawler({
  maxConcurrency: 5,           // Fewer concurrent — browsers are heavy
  headless: true,
  launchContext: {
    launchOptions: {
      args: ["--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled"],
    },
  },

  async requestHandler({ page, request, pushData, enqueueLinks }) {
    // Wait for dynamic content to load
    await page.waitForSelector("[data-loaded='true']", { timeout: 10000 });

    // Extract data using Playwright selectors
    const items = await page.$$eval(".product-card", (cards) =>
      cards.map((card) => ({
        name: card.querySelector("h3")?.textContent?.trim(),
        price: card.querySelector(".price")?.textContent?.trim(),
        rating: card.querySelector(".stars")?.getAttribute("data-rating"),
      }))
    );

    for (const item of items) {
      await pushData({ ...item, sourceUrl: request.url });
    }

    // Scroll to load more (infinite scroll)
    await page.evaluate(() => window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight));
    await page.waitForTimeout(2000);

    // Click "Load More" if exists
    const loadMore = page.locator("button:has-text('Load More')");
    if (await loadMore.isVisible()) {
      await loadMore.click();
      await page.waitForLoadState("networkidle");
    }
  },
});

await crawler.run(["https://spa-example.com/products"]);

Proxy Rotation

// proxy-scraper.ts — Rotate proxies to avoid blocking
import { CheerioCrawler, ProxyConfiguration } from "crawlee";

const proxyConfig = new ProxyConfiguration({
  proxyUrls: [
    "http://user:pass@proxy1.example.com:8080",
    "http://user:pass@proxy2.example.com:8080",
    "http://user:pass@proxy3.example.com:8080",
  ],
});

const crawler = new CheerioCrawler({
  proxyConfiguration: proxyConfig,
  // Crawlee automatically rotates and retires failing proxies
  async requestHandler({ request, $, pushData, proxyInfo }) {
    console.log(`Using proxy: ${proxyInfo?.url}`);
    // ... scraping logic
  },
});

Examples

Example 1: Scrape product data from an e-commerce site

User prompt: "Scrape all product names, prices, and ratings from example-shop.com and export to CSV."

The agent will create a CheerioCrawler with pagination handling, structured data extraction, and CSV export.

Example 2: Monitor competitor prices

User prompt: "Build a daily scraper that checks competitor prices and alerts when they change."

The agent will create a PlaywrightCrawler for JS-rendered pages, store prices in a dataset, compare with previous runs, and send alerts on changes.

Guidelines

• Cheerio for static HTML — 10x faster than browser crawling
• Playwright for SPAs — use only when JavaScript rendering is required
• enqueueLinks for crawling — automatically follows and deduplicates links
• pushData for structured output — builds a dataset that exports to CSV/JSON
• Proxy rotation for scale — Crawlee retires failing proxies automatically
• Respect robots.txt — check robotsTxtUrl in crawler config
• Rate limit — maxRequestsPerMinute to avoid overwhelming targets
• Request labels — use labels to route different page types to different handlers
• Error handling — failedRequestHandler catches and logs failed URLs
• Storage persists — datasets and queues survive restarts by default