This session will provide an introduction to Google's Puppeteer. Puppeteer is an advanced api to control Chrome, including in headless mode, using the open-source, cross-platform Node.js runtime.
This session will show you how to use readily available Chrome extensions to simplify your development of web scraping and testing automation workflows. This session will demonstrate building of a workflow from the beginning as well as discussing and demonstrating multiple use cases as well as covering some limitations in the tools available.
Puppeteer is extremely useful for gathering data where an API or public export is not available. Additionally, it can be used to build out expansive testing workflows including reporting back on performance issues. Puppeteer also provides self healing capabilities as well as the ability to call external programs. This has proven useful to scrape various content sources and then rapidly develop parsing routines in languages more familiar with our staff.
While this session has been marked as an Intermediate audience, please note that we will start with a Beginner overview.
Additional information and examples can be found at Google's website: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/puppeteer/
