Npmjs Scraper
Spider read npmjs.org in 257 ms without a browser and returned 27 lines of clean markdown.
*This piece is a part of our Customer Convos series. We’re sharing stories of how people use npm at work. Want to share your thoughts? Drop us a line.***Q: Hi! Can you state your name, what you do, and/or what your company does?****A:** Hey there! My name is Feross Aboukhadijeh. I’m an entrepreneur and programmer who spends a lot of time writing open source code. A few examples of projects I started are WebTorrent and Standard, which are open source. You can learn more about my newest projects by checking out my blog or GitHub profile.Pretty great! I’m happy that it’s finally the weekend. I’m doing some reading, open source maintenance, and tonight I’m hosting a party with my awesome housemates.**Tell me the story of npm at your company. What specific problem did you have that npm solved?**I first encountered npm while starting my first company, PeerCDN, in 2013. PeerCDN was a peer-to-peer content delivery network (CDN) which aimed to make the web faster, and help reduce website bandwidth costs. npm allowed us to build something useful super quickly. We installed `express`, `ws`, wrote some custom WebRTC magic and we had prototype off the ground in a few weeks. (We were eventually acquired by Yahoo).The vast majority of the software I’ve written has been open source. I have over 100 packages on npm! I am able to create lots of value in the world when I don’t restrict how people can use my work. Publishing things under an open source license lets anyone use my code however they like, which is super powerful.**To people who are unsure what they could use npm for — how would you explain the use case?**If you want to use any modern JavaScript library, you’re going to get it from npm. Period.**How’s the day to day experience of using npm?**These two magic commands are the not-so-secret incantations that bring any npm package to life. As an npm user, you’ll type these commands dozens of times every day.The same call, in code.
The capture above came back as markdown. These examples add a key, so you get browser rendering, proxies, and concurrency on npmjs.org.
import { SpiderBrowser } from "spider-browser";
const spider = new SpiderBrowser({
apiKey: process.env.SPIDER_API_KEY!,
});
await spider.connect();
const page = spider.page!;
await page.goto("https://npmjs.org");
// No selectors, no schema. Spider reads the page and names the fields.
const data = await page.scrape();
console.log(data);
await spider.close();import { Spider } from "@spider-cloud/spider-client";
const spider = new Spider({ apiKey: process.env.SPIDER_API_KEY! });
const result = await spider.scrapeUrl("https://www.npmjs.org", {
return_format: "markdown",
});
console.log(result);Ready for volume? Get an API key →
Fields you can pull.
Spider names these from the page. The capture above came back as markdown; the same
call with return_format: "json" returns them as keys.
What npmjs.org costs to scrape.
The capture above cost $0.000025 to fetch. Pricing is $1 per GB of pre-transformation bandwidth plus $0.001 per CPU minute, so a page like this one lands at a fraction of a cent. Failed requests are billed at $0.
- Free balance on signup
- No card required to test
- Balance never expires
Run it keyless, no account
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Start scraping npmjs.org.
You already have the call. A key raises the rate limit and turns on browser rendering, proxies, and concurrency. Balance never expires, and top-ups go through secure checkout.