harke-puppeteer

Headless scraper for YouTube using Puppeteer based on our YouTube parser harke. It was mainly used for testing the parsers as well as monitoring some playlists on a server (without doing API requests).

Check out this new repo for more scrapers: https://github.com/algorithmwatch/dataskop-scrapers

Installation

git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.3.0 https://github.com/algorithmwatch/harke.git
cd harke
yarn install
yarn build
cd ..
git clone https://github.com/algorithmwatch/harke-puppeteer.git
cd harke-puppeteer
yarn install
yarn add ../harke

Usage

Login

yarn run cli -l

Run all parsers to check if they are working

yarn run cli -a

Watch history

yarn run cli -w

Search history

yarn run cli -h

Single video

yarn run cli -v https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWlGDbMEtxM

Search results

yarn run cli -s antifa

Monitoring

To monitor YouTube's news playlists.

• install npm, yarn, and all missing deps for puppeeter on your server
• ./deploy.sh (see script below)
• then:

cd ../harke-puppeteer
yarn add ../harke

deploy.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
set -x

rsync --recursive --verbose --exclude .git --exclude node_modules --exclude html --exclude data --exclude user_data . server:~/code/harke-puppeteer
rsync --recursive --verbose ../harke/build server:~/code/harke
rsync --recursive --verbose ../harke/*.json server:~/code/harke

run.sh

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -x

sleep $((RANDOM % 120))
date=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')
db_location="/root/yt-playlists-data/db${date}.json"
echo $date
cd /root/code/harke-puppeteer
yarn run cli -m --dbLocation $db_location

Crontab:

*/7 * * * * /root/run.sh

Documentation

Log in to Google (complicated)

We have to use some obfuscation to make the Google login work. We are using: https://github.com/berstend/puppeteer-extra/tree/master/packages/puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth

Firefox

Alternativly, we could use puppeteer with Firefox. To setup, specify this in .launch:

  product: 'firefox',

yarn remove puppeteer
PUPPETEER_PRODUCT=firefox yarn add puppeteer

Unfortunatly, using it with Firefox was buggy. (But Google was not blocking the login)

License

MIT