Introducing a new, easy-to-use library to work with Zyte Smart Proxy Manager

We are super excited to share some good news for all the Puppeteer users who are looking for an easy-to-integrate anti-ban solution for extracting data from javascript-heavy websites. We are very happy to announce the launch of a new library to help called Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer that's going to make your life so much easier!

At Zyte, the developer experience matters the most, and we wanted to give you a smooth experience of scraping dynamic websites with seamless integration between Puppeteer and our smart rotating proxy service, Zyte Smart Proxy Manager.

I’m going to give you a quick explanation of how to get started, it’s super easy!

What is Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer library? 

Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer library is a client library built on top of Puppeteer — a high-level API to control headless chrome, written to work seamlessly with Zyte Smart Proxy Manager. With this library, you will be able to make the best of the headless browser capabilities of Puppeteer and manage bans by unlocking the powerful proxy management tool - Zyte Smart Proxy Manager in your web scraping projects.

Using our library for Puppeteer you will no longer have to maintain a separate piece of software running in the background to help connect with Zyte Smart Proxy Manager. 

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how your Puppeteer web scraping script will have superhero capabilities to 

• Handle data nested in scripts
• Manage proxy rotation
• Manage bans
• Manage sessions
• Increase cost savings in your project
• Speed up page loads

Prerequisite for the tutorial: 

In order to run the script used in the tutorial, please make sure that you are ready with the following:

• Have a Zyte Smart Proxy Manager account
  If you don’t have an SPM account, sign-up for a 14-day free trial here. Check out our docs on subscribing to Smart Proxy Manager for detailed instructions.
  
• Be ready with a Zyte Smart Proxy Manager API Key
  Once you sign up, you will see your API key on the Getting Started page.
  If you already have a Smart Proxy Manager subscription, select ‘Smart Proxy Manager’ under ‘Tools’ on the left side of the dashboard and click on ‘API Access’. Make note of it, as we will need it later in the code.
  
• Install Node.js and npm
  Install Node.js, npm on your system, and ensure that /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH environment variable.

Setting up the Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer  

Installing Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer library is super easy. Just run the following command using npm and it will automatically install the native Puppeteer library along with a stable up-to-date chromium version that is compatible with the version of Puppeteer being installed.

Awesome, now that you are all set and configured. Let’s get the show started!

Using Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer for seamless web scraping

To demonstrate the integration between Zyte Smart Proxy Manager and our headless browser library for Puppeteer, we will write a script that will cause our headless browser to take a screenshot of ‘Web Scraping Sandbox’. This sandbox is developed by Zyte for demonstration purposes, feel free to play around with it and experiment with new techniques around web scraping. 

Let’s start our Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer tutorial with this basic example. 

Create a new file with the name sample.js and open it in your favorite code editor

1. First, let’s import the Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer library into your script.
   
   const puppeteer = require('zyte-smartproxy-puppeteer');<br>
   const puppeteer = require('zyte-smartproxy-puppeteer');

2. Next, create an instance of the browser with additional parameters - headless, spm_apikey, set `ignoreHTTPSErrors` to true.
   
   2.1. It is important to note, that by default Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer will open the browser in headless mode. We have set the `headless` parameter to `false`. This means that it will open the Chromium GUI.
   
   2.2. Set the value of `spm_apikey`, as mentioned in the prerequisite above.

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
        spm_apikey: '<<enter your API key here>>',
        ignoreHTTPSErrors: true,
        headless: false,
    });

3. It is a good practice for developer experience to use logs for easy debugging and show the trace of what’s happening in the code. Before opening the new page in the browser, add a log.
   
   console.log('Before new page');
   console.log('Before new page');

4. Next, open a new page using the browser instance, which is just like opening a tab in your browser.
   
   const page = await browser.newPage();<br>
   const page = await browser.newPage();

5. Now, you can request for any webpage to be loaded, with the help of `goto` function. If the server responds to the request, it will open the web scraping sandbox, else it will throw an error in the logs.

  try {
        await page.goto('https://toscrape.com/', {timeout: 180000});
    } catch(err) {
        console.log(err);
    }

6. Take a screenshot of the web scraping sandbox, with ‘screenshot’ function. In the path argument, give the path to the directory where you want to save the screenshot. The path used in this script will save the screenshot in your current directory which contains `sample.js`.
   
   await page.screenshot({path: 'screenshot.png'});<br>
   await page.screenshot({path: 'screenshot.png'});

   
7. Finally, don’t forget to close the browser.
   
   await browser.close();<br>
   await browser.close();

   
   The final code should look like this:

const puppeteer = require('zyte-smartproxy-puppeteer');
(async () => {
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
        spm_apikey: '<<enter your API key here>>',
        ignoreHTTPSErrors: true,
        headless: false,
    });
    console.log('Before new page');
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    console.log('Opening page ...');
    try {
        await page.goto('https://toscrape.com/', {timeout: 180000});
    } catch(err) {
        console.log(err);
    }
    console.log('Taking a screenshot ...');
    await page.screenshot({path: 'screenshot.png'});
    await browser.close();
})();

Execute script on the command line.

$ node sample.js 

If your script runs successfully, you should be able to see the following in your terminal 

And also, ‘screenshot.png’ in your project folder. 

Additional functionalities 

In addition to easy integration and management of headless capabilities of Puppeteer with Zyte Smart Proxy Manager, our library provides additional functionalities such as

• Automatic session management with Zyte Smart Proxy Manager.
• Ad-blocking to speed up page loads and save costs (Zyte Smart Proxy Manager charges only per successful request). You can use the ‘block_ads’ argument and set it ‘true' and the library will block ads defined by block_list using @cliqz/adblocker-puppeteer package.
• Direct downloading static assets (images, CSS, javascript, etc.) to speed up page load and save costs in Zyte Smart Proxy requests. You can use the ‘static_bypass’ argument and set it to ‘true’. and the library will skip the proxy used for static assets defined by `static_bypass_regex` or pass false to use the proxy.

Important note: block_ads and static_bypass are enabled by default. Some websites may not work with block_ads and static_bypass enabled. Try disabling them if you encounter any issues. To know more about these functionalities, read here. 

Learn how to superpower your Smart Proxy Manager with Puppeteer

Using libraries like Zyte SmartProxy Puppeteer can make it so much easier to work with dynamic websites and manage bans and proxies all together in a single piece of code. Later this month, on the 22nd of June, I will be hosting a webinar to demonstrate the true power of this new integration and show you how to make the most out of it. So be sure to join me!

This webinar will be a good opportunity for you to interact with our web scraping experts and clarify your doubts on the fly while doing hands-on integration of these libraries.

Say good bye to geo-blocks, captcha & blocked crawlers

Read more 

If you are new to headless browsers, Puppeteer and Zyte Smart Proxy Manager. Here are a few links to learn more about these topics. I hope you find them useful. 

• Zyte Smartproxy Puppeteer: A wrapper over Puppeteer to provide Zyte Smart Proxy Manager specific functionalities.
• Zyte Smart Proxy Manager: When extracting web data at scale using proxy management is critical to avoid getting banned or blocked. Smart Proxy Manager automatically selects the best proxies to keep your crawl healthy. It handles retries and applies rotation and fingerprinting logic to maximize your success rate.
• Integration SPM with Puppeteer: Learn more about the integration on our company docs. 
• What is a Headless Browser?: A headless browser is a web browser without a user interface. Basically, it’s the same Chrome or Firefox we normally use with things we can click or touch stripped away: no tab bar, URL bar, bookmarks, or any other elements for visual interaction. 
• How does a headless browser help with web scraping and data extraction?: understand the role of headless browsers in web scraping with our Technical Lead-Pawel. 
• Puppeteer: Puppeteer is a Node library that provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol.