How to fetch authenticated CSV’s with Google Chrome (Headless) in NodeJS

9/11/2018 — 2 min read

Recently I had a use case where we need to log in to a third-party site and fetch protected CSV files. While PhantomJS (via CasperJS) can often accomplish this take, we have had issues with its stability often crashing, especially in Docker.

But that’s okay because Google Chrome (headless) is up to the task and has quite an awesome, simple API to use.

Here is a NodeJS sample using puppeteer to interact with Google Chrome (Headless). First, we need to install the puppeteer module.

npm install puppeteer --save

Once the module has been installed create a Javascript file with the following contents.

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
// variables
const USER = '[email protected]';
const PASS = 'password';

(async () => {
// create a browser instance
// use the --no-sandbox and --disable-setuid-sandbox parameters depending on your kernel support
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ executablePath: '/usr/bin/chromium-browser', headless: true, args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-setuid-sandbox', '--disable-gpu'] });
// create a page instance
const page = await browser.newPage();

// export the browser and page variables so we can debug using Chrome Developer Tools
Object.assign(global, { browser, page });

// output script console messages in our terminal console
page.on('console', msg => console.log(`chrome[${msg.text()}]`));

// connect to the site
await page.goto('https://site.com/users/sign_in', { waitUntil: 'networkidle0' });

// login to the site
await page.click('#user_email');
await page.keyboard.type(USER);
await page.click('#user_password');
await page.keyboard.type(PASS);
await page.click('#new_user input[type="submit"]');
await page.waitForNavigation();

// now we are going to tell the Chrome instance to use the fetch() function to download the content for us.
// be sure to include the credentials so that any cookies and session variables are passed through and then
// the downloaded content will be returned to our NodeJS script.
const downloadUrl = 'https://site.com/fetch/file.csv';
const downloadedContent = await page.evaluate(async downloadUrl => {
const fetchResp = await fetch(downloadUrl, { credentials: 'include' });
return await fetchResp.text();
}, downloadUrl);

console.log(`Downloaded: ${downloadedContent}`);

await browser.close();
})();

Now we just need to run our sample and watch the output.

node test.js

Related Articles

Start Creating Freedom today

Learn to build fast, scalable SaaS as I document my journey towards freedom. Follow along for real-world lessons and insights from my experiences.

    No spam ever. Unsubscribe anytime.
    1.1K builders