Web Scraping for Beginners: Your First Scraper in 10 Minutes (Node.js)

#javascript #beginners #tutorial #webdev

Never scraped a website before? This guide gets you from zero to extracting real data in 10 minutes.

Step 1: Set Up (1 minute)

mkdir my-first-scraper && cd my-first-scraper
npm init -y
npm install cheerio

Step 2: Write the Scraper (3 minutes)

Create scraper.js:

const cheerio = require('cheerio');

async function scrape() {
  // Fetch a webpage
  const url = 'https://news.ycombinator.com';
  const res = await fetch(url);
  const html = await res.text();

  // Parse the HTML
  const $ = cheerio.load(html);

  // Extract data
  const stories = [];
  $('.titleline > a').each((i, el) => {
    stories.push({
      rank: i + 1,
      title: $(el).text(),
      url: $(el).attr('href')
    });
  });

  // Display results
  console.log(`Found ${stories.length} stories:\n`);
  stories.slice(0, 10).forEach(s => {
    console.log(`${s.rank}. ${s.title}`);
  });

  return stories;
}

scrape();

Step 3: Run It (1 minute)

node scraper.js

Output:

Found 30 stories:

1. Show HN: I built a terminal-only Bluesky client
2. ArXiv Declares Independence from Cornell
3. OpenCode – The open source AI coding agent
...

Congratulations! You just scraped Hacker News.

Step 4: Save as JSON (2 minutes)

const fs = require('fs');
const stories = await scrape();
fs.writeFileSync('stories.json', JSON.stringify(stories, null, 2));
console.log('Saved to stories.json');

Step 5: Save as CSV (2 minutes)

const csv = stories.map(s => `${s.rank},"${s.title}","${s.url}"`).join('\n');
fs.writeFileSync('stories.csv', 'rank,title,url\n' + csv);
console.log('Saved to stories.csv');

What You Learned

fetch() — get webpage HTML
cheerio.load() — parse HTML
$('selector') — find elements (same as jQuery)
$(el).text() — get text content
$(el).attr('href') — get attribute

Next Steps

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