Use stealth mode

Deprecated: This example is deprecated. Checkout the Avoid getting blocked guide.

Stealth mode allows you to bypass anti-scraping techniques that use browser fingerprinting. It overrides the attributes specified for headless browser mode, making your headless browser harder to distinguish from the full Chrome browser.

To activate stealth mode, you need to useChrome, run headless and turn stealth on in your launchContext.

const launchContext = {
    useChrome: true,
    stealth: true,
    launchOptions: {
        headless: true,
    },
}

const Apify = require('apify');

Apify.main(async () => {
    const requestList = await Apify.openRequestList('start-urls', ['https://news.ycombinator.com/']);

    const crawler = new Apify.PuppeteerCrawler({
        requestList,
        launchContext: {
            useChrome: true,
            stealth: true,
            launchOptions: {
                headless: true,
            },
            // You can override default stealth options
            // stealthOptions: {
            //     addLanguage: false,
            // },
        },
        handlePageFunction: async ({ page }) => {
            const data = await page.$$eval('.athing', ($posts) => {
                const scrapedData = [];
                // Get the title of each post on Hacker News
                $posts.forEach(($post) => {
                    const title = $post.querySelector('.title a').innerText;
                    scrapedData.push({
                        title: `The title is: ${title}`,
                    });
                });
                return scrapedData;
            });
            // Save the data array to the Apify dataSet
            await Apify.pushData(data);
        },
    });
    await crawler.run();
});

You can then specify the stealthOptions, which allow you to adapt to different anti-scraping techniques. All the options are set to true by default. The number of options does not affect performance.

While the default configuration will be fine in many cases, you can adapt the options to your use case.

Single-browser instances

You can also use stealth mode in single-browser instances when using Apify.launchPuppeteer. The launchContext is the same.