techwithtim / price-tracking-web-scraper

An automated price tracker that uses bright data, playwright, react and flask.

Project Information

This project provides a user interface to interact with an automated price tracking web scraper. Currently the tracker scrapes amazon.ca, but could be configured to scrape multiple sources.

Libraries/Frameworks/Modules

This project uses:

• React
• Flask
• Playwright
• Bright Data (Web Scraping Browser)

Using the Scraper

Install all dependencies, create the auth.json file, start the flask backend, run the react frontend and interact with the tool.

auth.json

Fill in your Bright Data Scraping Browser credentials in a backend/scraper/auth.json file (see auth_example.json).

Python Flask Backend

• cd backend
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• playwright install
• python app.py or python3 app.py

Running the React Frontend

• cd frontend
• npm i
• npm run start

Setting Up Automation

To automate the collection of prices from this software simply run the scheduler/main.py file at your desired increment while the python flask backend is running.

Windows

I have created a simple .bat script called run.bat that you can schedule to execute using the Windows Task Scheduler that will automatically run the backend api and send the appropriate request to it.

price-tracking-web-scraper's Issues

How to retool for scraping other sites?

do you have a tutorial/resources on how to retool this for scraping another site (like Youtube)?

Mac

Can you run it on mac as well?

Issue: Can the UI be modified. (making it a little pretty)

Port/CORS issue on Mac OS Ventura

On Mac OS Ventura, I kept getting 'Error starting scraper' errors after clicking on the Start Scraper button. I checked Chrome devtools and saw that I was getting CORS errors ('No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource').

I know Flask CORS is supposed to avoid this issue, but also tried to explicitly add the correct response headers. No luck.

Mac OS is now using port 5000 for Airplay, the port that Flask defaults to. I changed the frontend and backend to use port 5050 the app now works.

The changes are:

1. Search and replace all occurrences of '5000' with '5050'
2. In app.py, replace 'app.run()' with app.run(port=5050)

I can submit a PR if you want to changes.

Is this repo actively accepting PR?

theres a bug in the database