Web Scraping with Node.js: From DIY to Production-Ready with Crawlee
In the world of software engineering, data is king. And sometimes, the data you need isn't conveniently available via a public API. This is where web scraping comes into play: the automated extraction of information from websites. Whether it's for market research, price comparison, content aggregation, or training machine learning models, web scraping is a powerful tool in a developer's arsenal. Node.js, with its asynchronous, event-driven architecture, is exceptionally well-suited for web scraping. Its non-blocking I/O model allows it to make numerous concurrent HTTP requests without getting bogged down, making it incredibly efficient for crawling many pages quickly. While you can build a basic scraper using raw axios (or node-fetch ) for HTTP requests and cheerio for DOM parsing, you'll quickly discover that robust, production-grade scraping is far more complex than just fetching an HTML page. This is where high-level frameworks become indispensable. And for Node....