Phantom Scrape

Bypass Cloudflare and anti-bot protections using headless Chrome. When a URL is blocked, don't retry with HTTP clients — launch a real browser.

When to activate

• WebFetch returns 403 or empty content
• curl returns <title>Just a moment...</title> or a Cloudflare challenge page
• User asks to scrape, crawl, or extract data from a website that blocks automated requests

Setup

Ensure Puppeteer is available in the project. If not installed, run:

npm install puppeteer

This downloads a bundled Chromium binary (~200MB). Run in background if needed — install may take a few minutes.

Scraping workflow

Write and execute a Node.js script using Puppeteer. Follow this pattern:

const puppeteer = require("puppeteer");

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    headless: "new",
    args: ["--no-sandbox", "--disable-setuid-sandbox"],
  });

  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.setUserAgent(
    "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) " +
    "AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
  );

  await page.goto(TARGET_URL, {
    waitUntil: "networkidle2",
    timeout: 60000,
  });

  // Detect and wait out Cloudflare challenge
  const title = await page.title();
  if (
    title.includes("Just a moment") ||
    title.includes("Attention Required") ||
    title.includes("Checking your browser")
  ) {
    await page.waitForFunction(
      () =>
        !document.title.includes("Just a moment") &&
        !document.title.includes("Attention Required") &&
        !document.title.includes("Checking your browser"),
      { timeout: 30000 }
    );
  }

  // Extract content
  const data = await page.evaluate(() => {
    return {
      title: document.title,
      text: document.body.innerText,
      links: Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("a")).map((a) => ({
        text: a.textContent.trim(),
        href: a.href,
      })),
    };
  });

  console.log(JSON.stringify(data, null, 2));

  // Screenshot for visual verification
  await page.screenshot({ path: "screenshot.png", fullPage: true });

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

Critical settings

Escalation: stealth mode

If basic Puppeteer gets detected (Turnstile CAPTCHA, advanced fingerprinting), escalate to stealth mode:

npm install puppeteer-extra puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth

const puppeteer = require("puppeteer-extra");
const StealthPlugin = require("puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth");
puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin());

// Then launch as normal — stealth patches headless detection vectors:
// WebGL, Canvas, Chrome.runtime, navigator.plugins, etc.
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: "new" });

Multi-page crawling

When scraping across multiple pages, reuse the browser instance and add delays between requests:

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: "new" });

for (const url of urls) {
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: "networkidle2", timeout: 30000 });
  // ... extract data ...
  await page.close();
  // Respectful delay between requests
  await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, 1000 + Math.random() * 2000));
}

await browser.close();

Rules

1. Always call browser.close() — orphaned Chrome processes leak memory
2. Always set a realistic User-Agent string
3. Use page.screenshot() when debugging to see what the browser actually renders
4. For large scraping jobs, write extracted data to a JSON file rather than logging to stdout
5. Never hardcode credentials or tokens in scraping scripts