/hero

The web browser built for scraping

Primary LanguageTypeScriptMIT LicenseMIT

Ulixee Hero

A few cool highlights about Hero:

  • Built for scraping - it's the first modern headless browsers designed specifically for scraping instead of just automated testing.
  • Designed for web developers - We've recreated a fully compliant DOM directly in NodeJS allowing you bypass the headaches of previous scraper tools.
  • Powered by Chrome - The powerful Chrome engine sits under the hood, allowing for lightning fast rendering.
  • Emulates any modern browser - Emulators make it easy to disguise your script as practically any browser.
  • Avoids detection along the entire stack - Don't be blocked because of TLS fingerprints in your networking stack.

Check out our website for more details.

Installation

You can get a playground started with Hero very quickly. A playground is a one-time use hero instance that will shut down once you've run a single script. This is great for quick scripts or testing.

npm i --save @ulixee/hero-playground

Once you're ready to graduate to deploying, check out the docs here: Deploying Hero.

Usage

Hero provides access to the W3C DOM specification without the need for Puppeteer's complicated evaluate callbacks and multi-context switching:

const Hero = require('@ulixee/hero-playground');

(async () => {
  const hero = new Hero();
  await hero.goto('https://example.org');
  const title = await hero.document.title;
  const intro = await hero.document.querySelector('p').textContent;
  await hero.close();
})();

Browse the full API docs.

Using this Repository

This is a Monorepo to work on the Browser Detect + Evade workflow of building an automated engine. It requires Yarn workspaces.

You can work with the project by:

  1. Cloning the repository and installing git submodules (you can add --recursive to your initial clone request).
  2. Run yarn build. NOTE: you must run this command to build typescript files.

Using devenv for an isolated development sandbox (using nix)

Using this setup everything will be automatically installed with the exact same versions for everyone. This avoids a lot of installation issues, and can help automate a lot of boring setup jobs.

  1. Install nix
  2. Install devenv
  3. Install direnv . Only needed if you want everything the auto load.
  4. Make sure direnv works with zsh or other shell

Browser Profiles

If you want to work with profiles (ie, update Emulator Data, generate Double Agent probes, etc), you'll need to download the BrowserProfiles data: $ yarn workspace @ulixee/unblocked-browser-profiler downloadData. This will clone data into a folder called browser-profile-data adjacent to the unblocked folder.

Unblocked

This project maintains a suite of tools for protecting the web's open knowledge. Its primary function is to create a web-scraping engine that mimics a human interacting with a website - both from a user behavior, as well as from a "browser" perspective.

Unblocked Projects

This repository is home to several of the projects needed to create an "unblocked" automated browser engine. We imagine a world where there are many participants sharing evasions and emulations for all the web features into a single repository. They will live right next to an advanced bot blocking [detection engine][double-agent] that can analyze every facet of a web scraping session (TCP, TLS, HTTP, DOM, User Interactions, etc). A profiler that can run all [detections][double-agent] using real browser/operating systems to generate [profiles][profiles] of true browser signatures. And an implementation of an [agent][agent] that can run all the evasions and run unblocked.

  • [Specifications][spec]. This contains generic specifications for what an automated browser needs to expose so that it can be hooked into to emulate a normal, headed browser engine. To properly mask the differences between headless Chrome on a linux machine, and a headed Chrome running on a home operating system, a series of "hooks" needs to be exposed. These include things like before browsers start, web pages launch, and web workers have a javascript environment. This specification will be the minimum spec needed to open up the browser to plugin authors.
  • [JsPath][jspath]. A specification is provided for a method to serialize DOM nodes, properties and visibility information so it can be remotely queried.
  • [Agent][agent]. A basic automated engine that implements the full reference [Specifications][spec].
  • Plugins. Unblocked community plugins that enhance a browser to mask Browser, Network, User Interaction and Operating System "markers" that can be used to block web scrapers.
  • [DoubleAgent][double-agent]. A series of tests that can be run to analyze real Browsers on real machines, and then compare all the detected markers to an automated setup.
  • DoubleAgent Stacks. Runners for common scraper stacks. This can also serve as a workflow example for your own stack.
  • [Real User Agents][real-user-agents]. A library that collects real Chromium releases and UserAgent strings collected from real browsers. This is used to generate UserAgent strings for various combinations of Browsers and Operating Systems.
  • [Browser Profile Data][profiles]. A data repository containing profiles of real browsers using BrowserStack, Dockers and Local Doms. Includes deep diffing various environments of Chrome (headed, headless, with devtools, browserstack, between runs, etc).
  • Browser Profiler. Profiler to automatically collect [Browser Profile Data][profiles]. Automation to recreate files is driven from Profile Data project.
  • Emulator Builder. A library to use the collected data from Browser Profile Data to "patch" runtime headless Chrome to match headed Chrome on a home Operating System.
  • [Mission Impossible]. Real world measurement of what DOM Apis are being analyzed on the top websites, and how many are detecting and blocking the Unblocked Agent + Community Plugins. To be imported

Questions

Join us on the Ulixee Discord for any questions or comments (it's a sister project).

Contributing

See How to Contribute for ways to get started.

This project has a Code of Conduct. By interacting with this repository, organization, or community you agree to abide by its terms.

We'd love your help in making Hero a better tool. Please don't hesitate to send a pull request.

License

MIT