How to Use JQuery on an External Web Page With NodeJS

Feb 5, 2013 • 1 min read

I recently started a new project that scrapes certain web pages looking for content changes. There are a few Node modules designed for this purpose, and for my first attempt I chose to use jsdom. Jsdom worked great, but it needed a certain version of Python to be installed, which caused problems when running on Nodejitsu. I ended up switching to a combination of domino (which got rid of the Python dependancy) paired with zepto-node (JQuery-like library). Here is a quick snippet to get you started:

var request = require('request');
var domino = require('domino');
var Zepto = require('zepto-node');

var params = {
  url: 'https://google.com'
};

request(params, function(err, response, body) {
  if(err || response.statusCode !== 200) {
    console.warn('Failed to fetch url '+url);
  }

  var window = domino.createWindow(body);
  var $ = Zepto(window);
  
  var pageTitle = $('title').text();
  console.log('Page Title: '+pageTitle);
});

/**
 * OUTPUT
 *
 * Page Title: Google
 *
 */

Pretty easy right? Since domino is implemented in 100% Javascript, the app can safely be run inside of any Node environment.

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