/wscraper

Primary LanguageTypeScript

Web Scraping Practice Application | Build and Deploy eCommerce Price Tracker

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Introduction

Dive into web scraping and build a Next.js 14 eCommerce price tracker with data scraping, cron jobs, sending emails, deployment, and more.

Overview

Welcome to the Wscraper project, a comprehensive solution for tracking product prices on Amazon. This project is designed to scrape product details from Amazon, store the data in a MongoDB database, and send email notifications to users when there are changes in the product details. The project includes a web application with a user-friendly interface that allows users to search for products, view product details, and subscribe to product updates. The application is built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS, and it includes several components such as a home page, product details page, navbar, search bar, product card, price info card, and modal.

The server-side logic is implemented with serverless functions that handle various tasks such as connecting to the database, scraping product details, updating product information, and sending email notifications. The project also includes several utility functions for extracting information from web pages and formatting numbers.

Technologies and Frameworks

  • Next.js: A React framework for building web applications. It is used for both the frontend and the backend of the application.
  • Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs. It is used for styling the application.
  • TypeScript: A statically typed superset of JavaScript. It is used for writing the code.
  • Mongoose: An Object Data Modeling (ODM) library for MongoDB and Node.js. It is used for defining the product schema and interacting with the MongoDB database.
  • Nodemailer: A module for Node.js applications to allow easy email sending. It is used for sending email notifications to users.
  • Axios: A promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. It is used for making HTTP requests to scrape product details from Amazon.
  • Cheerio: A fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server. It is used for parsing the HTML response from the Amazon product page.
  • React Responsive Carousel: A lightweight carousel component for React. It is used for displaying a carousel of images on the home page.
  • Google Fonts: A library of free licensed font families. It is used for defining the font styles in the application.

Installation

Follow these steps to install and run the project:

  1. Clone the repository

    Open your terminal and run the following command to clone the repository:

    git clone https://github.com/dspias/wscraper.git

  2. Navigate to the project directory

    cd wscraper

  3. Install Node.js

    The project requires Node.js to run. If you don't have it installed, you can download it from here.

  4. Install the required packages

    The project requires several packages to be installed. Run the following command to install them:

    npm i

  5. Install the required fonts

    The project requires the "font-inter" and "font-spaceGrotesk" fonts to be available. You can download them from Google Fonts.

  6. Set up the environment variables

    The project requires the MONGODB_URI environment variable to be defined. You can do this in a .env.example to .env.local file in the root of your project:

    MONGODB_URI=your_mongodb_uri

  7. Start the server

    Run the following command to start the server:

    npm run start

Now, you should be able to access the project at http://localhost:3000.

Please note that the project requires the "m.media-amazon.com" domain to be accessible for image handling. If you are unable to access this domain, you may encounter issues with image loading.