John Polacek

Chicago Web Developer

Engineering manager and frontend lead at Howl

My product recommendations at shop.howl.me

Shipping open source on Github

Follow me at @johnpolacek

Next.js Web Scraper Playground

Originally published on 5/23/2021
Url and property input fields with a submit button for using the Next.js Scraper Playground

Was working a bit with setting up some web scraping using Next.js API routes, so I made a tool for experimenting with web scraping on different urls and parsing the markup with cheerio. You can see it at nextjs-scraper-playground.vercel.app and check out the code on Github.

To use it, enter a url, set some properties you want to have in your API then add jQuery-style selectors to pull in the data. The playground will attempt to scrape the URL and will display the result along with custom Next.js API Route you can add to your project.