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Cover image for How I Built FlyScrape: A TypeScript Web Scraper That Actually Works on Modern Websites
Admir Šaheta
Admir Šaheta

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How I Built FlyScrape: A TypeScript Web Scraper That Actually Works on Modern Websites

If you’ve ever tried scraping modern websites, you know the pain. SPAs that never fully load, lazy images hiding content, bot protections blocking your every request… I was losing hours, sometimes days, just trying to get usable data.

One late night, fueled by coffee and frustration, I thought: There has to be a better way. That’s how FlyScrape was born — a TypeScript Node.js package that makes scraping fast, reliable, and developer-friendly.

My Developer Nightmare

  • Multiple failed scrapers on SPAs
  • Infinite scroll pages that never end
  • Bot protections killing my requests
  • Messy, unstructured HTML that no AI model could digest

Sound familiar? I knew there had to be a smarter approach.

Enter FlyScrape

FlyScrape is modular, typed, and production-ready. It combines Playwright, stealth techniques, and AI-powered content cleaning to deliver structured, LLM-ready Markdown from any web page.

I can now scrape dynamic content, handle infinite scrolls, and avoid bot detection — all with minimal code and zero frustration.

Why I Built It This Way

  • TypeScript-first: Strong types and autocomplete mean fewer bugs and faster development
  • AI integration: Converts messy HTML to clean Markdown for RAG pipelines or content aggregation
  • Extensible hooks: Customize every stage of the crawl
  • Performance-minded: Caching, lazy load handling, and resource blocking keep things fast

How It Changed My Workflow

Before FlyScrape, I’d spend hours debugging failed crawls. Now I can:

  • Spin up a crawler in minutes
  • Extract content-ready Markdown in seconds
  • Integrate with AI pipelines effortlessly
  • Spend my time analyzing data, not wrestling websites

TL;DR

If you’re a developer tired of fighting modern websites, FlyScrape is here to save your sanity. Clean, modular, TypeScript-first, and AI-ready — built by a developer who’s been there.

Check it out on GitHub: FlyScrape ( https://github.com/flyrank-bih/flyscrape ) and star it ⭐ if you find it useful.

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