Scrape a webpage and navigate by clicking buttons

Short answer (in 2019): Use puppeteer

If you need a full (headless) browser, use puppeteer instead of PhantomJS as it offers an up-to-date Chromium browser with a rich API to automate any browser crawling and scraping tasks. If you only want to parse a HTML document (without executing JavaScript inside the page) you should check out jsdom and cheerio.

Explanation

Tools like jsdom (or cheerio) allow it to extract information from a HTML document by parsing it. This is fast and works well as long as the website does not contain JavaScript. It will be very hard or even impossible to extract information from a website built on JavaScript. jsdom, for example, is able to execute scripts, but runs them inside a sandbox in your Node.js environment, which can be very dangerous and possibly crash your application. To quote the docs:

However, this is also highly dangerous when dealing with untrusted content.

Therefore, to reliably crawl more complex websites, you need an actual browser. For years, the most popular solution for this task was PhantomJS. But in 2018, the development of PhantomJS was offically suspended. Thankfully, since April 2017 the Google Chrome team makes it possible to run the Chrome browser headlessly (announcement). This makes it possible to crawl websites using an up-to-date browser with full JavaScript support.

To control the browser, the library puppeteer, which is also maintained by Google developers, offers a rich API for use within the Node.js environment.

Code sample

The lines below, show a simple example. It uses Promises and the async/await syntax to execute a number of tasks. First, the browser is started (puppeteer.launch) and a URL is opened page.goto. After that, a functions like page.evaluate and page.click are used to extract information and execute actions on the page. Finally, the browser is closed (browser.close).

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  await page.goto('https://example.com');

  // example: get innerHTML of an element
  const someContent = await page.$eval('#selector', el => el.innerHTML);

  // Use Promise.all to wait for two actions (navigation and click)
  await Promise.all([
    page.waitForNavigation(), // wait for navigation to happen
    page.click('a.some-link'), // click link to cause navigation
  ]);

  // another example, this time using the evaluate function to return innerText of body
  const moreContent = await page.evaluate(() => document.body.innerText);

  // click another button
  await page.click('#button');

  // close brower when we are done
  await browser.close();
})();

The modules you listed do the following:

• Phantomjs/Zombie - simulate browser (headless - nothing is actually displayed). Can be used for scraping static or dynamic. Or testing of your html pages.
• Node.io/jsdom - webscraping : extracting data from page (static).

Looking at your requirements, you could use phantom or zombie.

Zombie.js and Node.io run on JSDOM, hence your options are either going with JSDOM (or any equivalent wrapper), a headless browser (PhantomJS, SlimerJS) or Cheerio.

• JSDOM is fairly slow because it has to recreate DOM and CSSOM in Node.js.
• PhantomJS/SlimerJS are proper headless browsers, thus performances are ok and those are also very reliable.
• Cheerio is a lightweight alternative to JSDOM. It doesn't recreate the entire page in Node.js (it just downloads and parses the DOM - no javascript is executed). Therefore you can't really click on buttons/links, but it's very fast to scrape webpages.

Given your requirements, I'd probably go with something like a headless browser. In particular, I'd choose CasperJS because it has a nice and expressive API, it's fast and reliable (it doesn't need to reinvent the wheel on how to parse and render the dom or css like JSDOM does) and it's very easy to interact with elements such as buttons and links.

Your workflow in CasperJS should look more or less like this:

casper.start();

casper
  .then(function(){
    console.log("Start:");
  })
  .thenOpen("https://www.domain.com/page1")
  .then(function(){
    // scrape something
    this.echo(this.getHTML('h1#foobar'));
  })
  .thenClick("#button1")
  .then(function(){
    // scrape something else
    this.echo(this.getHTML('h2#foobar'));
  })
  .thenClick("#button2")
  thenOpen("http://myserver.com", {
    method: "post",
    data: {
        my: 'data',
    }
  }, function() {
      this.echo("data sent back to the server")
  });

casper.run();