Woolworths Scraper

This project scrapes product info from Woolworths (Formerly Countdown) NZ website and optionally places the data into Azure CosmosDB.

A history of price changes is stored within each product's database entry.

Image files can also be scraped and placed into an Azure Storage Blob Container.

Basic Setup

With NodeJS installed, clone this repository, then run npm install to install dependencies.

Playwright must also be installed when running for the first time with npx playwright install.

The program can now be tested in dry run mode without any further setup using npm run dev.

Optional Setup

The .env file has variables that can be filled for more functionality.

STORE_NAME=             Optional supermarket location name
COSMOS_CONSTRING=       Read-write CosmosDB connection string
COSMOS_DB_NAME=         CosmosDB Name
COSMOS_CONTAINER=       CosmosDB Container Name, eg. products
COSMOS_PARTITION_KEY=   CosmosDB Partition Key, eg. /name
IMAGE_UPLOAD_FUNC_URL=  Optional image upload REST API URL

• The CosmosDB read-write connection string can be obtained from the Azure Portal > CosmosDB > Settings > Keys.
• A list of URLs to scrape can be put in file urls.txt, with one url per line.

Usage

npm run dev - will use dry-run mode, no azure connection is required and the results will log to console.

npm run db - will scrape through the URLs and store the results into CosmosDB.

npm run db https://sampleurl - a single url can be used as an argument. This will be scraped instead of the URLs text file.

Other Command-Line Arguments

images - will also upload images.

headed - will run the browser in a window instead of a headless.

Output

Sample log output when running in dry run mode:

    ID | Name                              | Size           | Price  | Unit Price
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
762844 | Ocean Blue Smoked Salmon Slices   | 100g           | $    9 | $90 /kg
697201 | Clearly Premium Smoked Salmon     | 200g           | $ 13.5 | $67.5 /kg
830035 | Ocean Blue Smoked Salmon Slices   | 180g           | $   12 | $67.7 /kg

This is a sample of a single product stored in CosmosDB. It was re-run at multiple dates to store changing prices:

{
  "id": "123456",
  "name": "Sausages Precooked Chinese Honey",
  "currentPrice": 12.9,
  "size": "Prepacked 1kg pack",
  "priceHistory": [
    {
      "date": "Sat Jan 14 2023",
      "price": 10
    },
    {
      "date": "Thu Jan 26 2023",
      "price": 12.9
    }
  ]
}