WEBVTT 00:03.830 --> 00:09.710 In this section, we are going to learn how to start up the chromium browser with puppeteer and how 00:09.710 --> 00:11.720 to make it visit a website. 00:11.750 --> 00:13.070 It's quite easy. 00:13.990 --> 00:17.940 First we are going to make a new file in the project folder. 00:17.950 --> 00:20.320 Let's call it Index.js. 00:21.860 --> 00:27.950 Now inside the folder, let's import puppeteer using require in the top of the file. 00:28.340 --> 00:33.080 So const puppeteer require puppeteer. 00:35.510 --> 00:38.480 And then let's make an async function. 00:41.060 --> 00:46.430 It's async await is one of the newest and really cool features of JavaScript. 00:46.460 --> 00:50.450 I'm going to leave a link in the lecture content so you can read more about it. 00:50.450 --> 00:56.030 If you're not already familiar with this feature or if you want to read more about difference between 00:56.030 --> 00:58.880 using then clauses and async await. 01:01.850 --> 01:08.030 So the first thing we need to do is to tell Puppeteer to initialize or open up the chromium browser. 01:08.030 --> 01:10.220 And doing this is really easy. 01:10.640 --> 01:17.630 We just write out const browser equals await puppeteer launch. 01:17.750 --> 01:22.850 And then we put in an option called Headless where we set it to false. 01:23.940 --> 01:30.060 So now we have the browser inside this browser variable and we can access our browser and control it 01:30.060 --> 01:31.200 from this variable. 01:31.810 --> 01:35.890 So notice that we're using the headless false option here. 01:36.190 --> 01:42.520 This means that the browser will not be hidden from you if you try to launch it without the headless 01:42.520 --> 01:43.390 false option. 01:43.390 --> 01:45.400 The browser is just going to be hidden. 01:47.080 --> 01:48.070 Running the browser. 01:48.070 --> 01:49.330 Headless is great. 01:49.330 --> 01:55.480 If you already developed your scraper and you are running it on a server without a graphical interface. 01:55.720 --> 02:02.560 But now, while we are developing and debugging our scraper, it's a pretty good advantage to see what 02:02.560 --> 02:07.690 Puppeteer is doing in the browser and this way we can more easily debug it. 02:09.700 --> 02:14.260 Now on to the next step, which is to open a new page or a new tab. 02:14.260 --> 02:17.320 And then we are going to actually visit a URL. 02:18.320 --> 02:18.800 Again. 02:18.800 --> 02:20.140 It is super easy. 02:20.150 --> 02:26.930 You just write out const page equals await browser new page. 02:28.190 --> 02:35.170 And now we use the browser variable to instantiate a new page variable which we can also control. 02:35.180 --> 02:38.930 And now we can finally make the page go to a URL. 02:39.110 --> 02:47.600 So we say await page dot, go to and let's try out a https google.com. 02:49.390 --> 02:54.970 Now let's try and run this script and see how it runs if we end up on Google.com. 02:55.240 --> 02:59.800 So node and then the file index dot js. 03:01.390 --> 03:09.340 So Puppeteer is now starting up the chromium browser and it is going to a URL and here we are on Google.com. 03:10.830 --> 03:11.790 So there you go. 03:11.790 --> 03:18.270 That is how you instantiate a new puppeteer controlled chromium browser, how you create a new tab or 03:18.270 --> 03:21.180 a new page, and then make it visit a URL. 03:21.840 --> 03:27.090 In the next section, we are going to take a closer look at the website where scraping the Craigslist 03:27.090 --> 03:30.960 website and what kind of data we are trying to scrape.