Botasaurus
The All in One Framework to Build Undefeatable Scrapers
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/learn @omkarcloud/BotasaurusQuality Score
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🐿️ Botasaurus In a Nutshell
How wonderful that of all the web scraping tools out there, you chose to learn about Botasaurus. Congratulations!
And now that you are here, you are in for an exciting, unusual, and rewarding journey that will make your web scraping life a lot easier.
Now, let me tell you about Botasaurus in bullet points. (Because as per marketing gurus, YOU as a member of the Developer Tribe have a VERY short attention span.)
So, what is Botasaurus?
Botasaurus is an all-in-one web scraping framework that enables you to build awesome scrapers in less time, with less code, and with more fun.
We have put all our web scraping experience and best practices into Botasaurus to save you hundreds of hours of development time!
Now, for the magical powers awaiting you after learning Botasaurus:
- In terms of humaneness, what Superman is to Man, Botasaurus is to Selenium and Playwright. Easily pass every (Yes, E-V-E-R-Y) bot test, and build undetected scrapers.
In the video below, watch as we bypass some of the best bot detection systems:
- ✅ Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- ✅ BrowserScan Bot Detection
- ✅ Fingerprint Bot Detection
- ✅ Datadome Bot Detection
- ✅ Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA
🔗 Want to try it yourself? See the code behind these tests here
-
Perform realistic, human-like mouse movements and say sayonara to detection

-
Convert your scraper into a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux in 1 day, so not only developers but everyone can use your web scraper.

- Turn your scraper into a beautiful website, making it easy for your customers to use it from anywhere, anytime.

-
Save up to 97%, yes 97%, on browser proxy costs by using browser-based fetch requests.
-
Easily save hours of development time with easy parallelization, profiles, extensions, and proxy configuration. Botasaurus makes asynchronous, parallel scraping child's play.
-
Use caching, sitemap, data cleaning, and other utilities to save hours of time spent writing and debugging code.
-
Easily scale your scraper to multiple machines with Kubernetes, and get your data faster than ever.
And those are just the highlights. I mean!
There is so much more to Botasaurus that you will be amazed at how much time you will save with it.
🚀 Getting Started with Botasaurus
Let's dive right in with a straightforward example to understand Botasaurus.
In this example, we will go through the steps to scrape the heading text from https://www.omkar.cloud/.

Step 1: Install Botasaurus
First things first, you need to install Botasaurus. Run the following command in your terminal:
python -m pip install --upgrade botasaurus
Step 2: Set Up Your Botasaurus Project
Next, let's set up the project:
- Create a directory for your Botasaurus project and navigate into it:
mkdir my-botasaurus-project
cd my-botasaurus-project
code . # This will open the project in VSCode if you have it installed
Step 3: Write the Scraping Code
Now, create a Python script named main.py in your project directory and paste the following code:
from botasaurus.browser import browser, Driver
@browser
def scrape_heading_task(driver: Driver, data):
# Visit the Omkar Cloud website
driver.get("https://www.omkar.cloud/")
# Retrieve the heading element's text
heading = driver.get_text("h1")
# Save the data as a JSON file in output/scrape_heading_task.json
return {
"heading": heading
}
# Initiate the web scraping task
scrape_heading_task()
Let's understand this code:
- We define a custom scraping task,
scrape_heading_task, decorated with@browser:
@browser
def scrape_heading_task(driver: Driver, data):
- Botasaurus automatically provides a Humane Driver to our function:
def scrape_heading_task(driver: Driver, data):
- Inside the function, we:
- Visit Omkar Cloud
- Extract the heading text
- Return the data to be automatically saved as
scrape_heading_task.jsonby Botasaurus:
driver.get("https://www.omkar.cloud/")
heading = driver.get_text("h1")
return {"heading": heading}
- Finally, we initiate the scraping task:
# Initiate the web scraping task
scrape_heading_task()
Step 4: Run the Scraping Task
Time to run it:
python main.py
After executing the script, it will:
- Launch Google Chrome
- Visit omkar.cloud
- Extract the heading text
- Save it automatically as
output/scrape_heading_task.json.

Now, let's explore another way to scrape the heading using the request module. Replace the previous code in main.py with the following:
from botasaurus.request import request, Request
from botasaurus.soupify import soupify
@request
def scrape_heading_task(request: Request, data):
# Visit the Omkar Cloud website
response = request.get("https://www.omkar.cloud/")
# Create a BeautifulSoup object
soup = soupify(response)
# Retrieve the heading element's text
heading = soup.find('h1').get_text()
# Save the data as a JSON file in output/scrape_heading_task.json
return {
"heading": heading
}
# Initiate the web scraping task
scrape_heading_task()
In this code:
- We scrape the HTML using
request, which is specifically designed for making browser-like humane requests. - Next, we parse the HTML into a
BeautifulSoupobject usingsoupify()and extract the heading.
Step 5: Run the Scraping Task (which makes Humane HTTP Requests)
Finally, run it again:
python main.py
This time, you will observe the exact same result as before, but instead of opening a whole browser, we are making browser-like humane HTTP requests.
💡 Understanding Botasaurus
What is Botasaurus Driver, and why should I use it over Selenium and Playwright?
Botasaurus Driver is a web automation driver like Selenium, and the single most important reason to use it is because it is truly humane. You will not, and I repeat NOT, have any issues accessing any website.
Plus, it is super fast to launch and use, and the API is designed by and for web scrapers, and you will love it.
How do I access Cloudflare-protected pages using Botasaurus?
Cloudflare is the most popular protection system on the web. So, let's see how Botasaurus can help you solve various Cloudflare challenges.
Connection Challenge
This is the single most popular challenge and requires making a browser-like connection with appropriate headers. It's commonly used for:
- Product Pages
- Blog Pages
- Search Result Pages
What Works?
- Visiting the website via Google Referrer (which makes it seem as if the user has arrived from a Google search).
from botasaurus.browser import browser, Driver
@browser
def scrape_heading_task(driver: Driver, data):
# Visit the website via Google Referrer
driver.google_get("https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/")
driver.prompt()
heading = driver.get_text('h1')
return heading
scrape_heading_task()
- Use the request module. The Request Object is smart and, by default, visits any link with a Google Referrer. Although it works, you will need to use retries.
from botasaurus.request import request, Request
@request(max_retry=10)
def scrape_heading_task(request: Request, data):
response = request.get("https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/")
print(response.status_code)
response.raise_for_status()
return response.text
scrape_heading_task()
JS with Captcha Challenge
This challenge requires performing JS computations that differentiate a Chrome controlled by Selenium/Puppeteer/Playwright from a real Chrome
