DEV Community

pradeep prajapati
pradeep prajapati

Posted on

Scrape Eventbrite events without a headless browser

#webscraping #python #api #datascience

Eventbrite has no free public API for searching events any more. The usual reaction is to reach for Selenium or Playwright, wait 4 seconds per page for React to settle, and then fight the DOM.

You don't need any of that. Eventbrite server-renders the entire event list as JSON into every search page. One requests.get and you have structured data — names, dates, venue addresses, coordinates, organizer IDs, ticket links, category tags.

Here's the whole thing.

The trick

Open any Eventbrite search page and look at the HTML source (not the inspector — the actual source). You'll find:

<script>window.__SERVER_DATA__ = { ... a very large JSON object ... };</script>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

That object contains search_data.events.results — the full, already-parsed event records that React is about to render. The browser is just decoration. Skip it:

import json, re, requests

UA = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/126.0 Safari/537.36"
SERVER_DATA = re.compile(r"window\.__SERVER_DATA__\s*=\s*(\{.*?\});", re.S)

def eventbrite_events(location, page=1):
    url = f"https://www.eventbrite.com/d/{location}/all-events/"
    if page > 1:
        url += f"?page={page}"
    html = requests.get(url, headers={"User-Agent": UA}, timeout=30).text
    m = SERVER_DATA.search(html)
    if not m:
        raise RuntimeError("__SERVER_DATA__ not found — page structure changed")
    blob = json.loads(m.group(1))["search_data"]["events"]
    return blob["results"], blob["pagination"]

events, pagination = eventbrite_events("india--mumbai")
print(f"{len(events)} events, page {pagination['page_number']} of {pagination['page_count']}")

e = events[0]
print(" name  :", e["name"])
print(" date  :", e["start_date"], e["start_time"])
print(" venue :", (e.get("primary_venue") or {}).get("name"))
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Output:

17 events, page 1 of 5
 name  : ASIASec 2026 | Anti-Counterfeit, Illicit Trade & Brand Protection
 date  : 2026-08-19 09:30
 venue : Radisson Blu Mumbai International Airport
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

No browser, no proxy, no API key. ~1 second.

Finding the location slug

It's just the URL segment. Browse to your city on Eventbrite and read the address bar:

https://www.eventbrite.com/d/india--mumbai/all-events/
                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
https://www.eventbrite.com/d/united-states--new-york/music/
                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The second segment is the category — all-events, music, business, food-and-drink, and so on.

What's in a record

More than you'd expect. The fields worth knowing about:

Field Notes
name, summary title and one-line description
start_date / start_time / end_date / end_time plus timezone as an IANA name
primary_venue.name venue name
primary_venue.address localized_address_display, city, region, country, latitude/longitude
primary_organizer_id stable ID to group events by organizer
tickets_url direct checkout link
tags[] category tags, with display_name
is_online_event, is_cancelled worth filtering on

The coordinates are the pleasant surprise — you get a geocoded venue for free, no Places API call.

The parts that actually bite

The snippet above is the easy 80%. What took me longer:

1. Pagination lies if you're careless. pagination.page_count tells you when to stop, but if you paste a URL that already has ?page=2 and blindly append &page=3, you get ?page=2&page=3 — Eventbrite honours the first one, you re-fetch the same page, every ID looks like a duplicate, and your crawler silently concludes it has reached the end. Strip the existing param before setting yours:

from urllib.parse import parse_qsl, urlencode, urlsplit, urlunsplit

def page_url(base_url, page):
    parts = urlsplit(base_url)
    q = [(k, v) for k, v in parse_qsl(parts.query) if k.lower() != "page"]
    if page > 1:
        q.append(("page", str(page)))
    return urlunsplit((parts.scheme, parts.netloc, parts.path, urlencode(q), parts.fragment))
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

2. Deduplicate across the whole run, not per search. Online events show up in every city's results. Two nearby cities overlap. If you keep a seen set per search instead of per run, you'll emit the same event several times. One set for the entire job.

3. Datacenter IPs get different treatment. This code works from my laptop and from a cloud runner I tested — but Eventbrite returns 405 Not Allowed to GitHub Actions runners. If your scraper "suddenly breaks" only in CI, test the IP before you debug the parser. (This is a general lesson: I lost an hour to it, and separately found that Booking.com serves an AWS WAF challenge to plain HTTP that no header tweak gets past.)

4. Fail loudly. If __SERVER_DATA__ disappears, raise — don't return []. A scraper that quietly returns nothing when a site changes is worse than one that crashes, because you'll ship empty data for weeks without noticing. Same for partial changes: assert on the fields you promise.

Be a good citizen

Sleep between requests (300ms is plenty), cap your page count, and set a real User-Agent. This is public event listing data — venue, time, ticket link — the same information Eventbrite publishes for humans to read. Don't harvest attendee or organizer personal data, and check Eventbrite's terms for your use case.

If you'd rather not maintain it

I run this as a hosted Actor on Apify, which handles the pagination, dedupe, retries and daily breakage checks:

Eventbrite Events Scraper — give it a city or a search URL, get clean JSON/CSV/Excel rows out, or call it from an API. It costs $3 per 1,000 events, and there's a free tier to try it on.

But honestly — the snippet at the top is most of it. If you only need one city once, just use that.

Questions or a field I missed? Happy to answer in the comments.

Top comments (0)