🏷️ Micro Scraper – Headless Metadata Extraction API

🧾 Executive Summary

Micro Scraper is an enterprise-grade, serverless-ready headless web intelligence API built on Next.js, TypeScript, and Puppeteer. It enables automated extraction of SEO-critical metadata (title, meta description, and H1) from any public webpage using a hardened, timeout-controlled Chromium engine. The system is designed for reliability, scalability, and integration into marketing analytics, lead intelligence, competitive research, and content auditing pipelines.

📑 Table of Contents

• 🏷️ Project Title
• 🧾 Executive Summary
• 📑 Table of Contents
• 🧩 Project Overview
• 🎯 Objectives & Goals
• ✅ Acceptance Criteria
• 💻 Prerequisites
• ⚙️ Installation & Setup
• 🔗 API Documentation
• 🖥️ UI / Frontend
• 🔢 Status Codes
• 🚀 Features
• 🧱 Tech Stack & Architecture
• 🛠️ Workflow & Implementation
• 🧪 Testing & Validation
• 🔍 Validation Summary
• 🧰 Verification Tools
• 🧯 Troubleshooting
• 🔒 Security & Secrets
• ☁️ Deployment
• ⚡ Quick-Start Cheat Sheet
• 🧾 Usage Notes
• 🧠 Performance & Optimization
• 🌟 Enhancements & Features
• 🧩 Maintenance & Future Work
• 🏆 Key Achievements
• 🧮 High-Level Architecture
• 🗂️ Project Structure
• 🧭 Live Demonstration
• 💡 Summary, Closure & Compliance

🧩 Project Overview

Micro Scraper is a production-ready, API-first metadata extraction engine that runs Chromium in a fully headless environment and exposes scraping functionality through a REST endpoint. It eliminates browser automation complexity for clients while enforcing timeouts, validation, and controlled execution.

🎯 Objectives & Goals

• Provide a zero-UI API for webpage metadata extraction
• Guarantee execution within 20-second SLA windows
• Prevent invalid or malformed URL execution
• Support user-agent spoofing for bot-resistant pages
• Be deployable on serverless platforms such as Vercel

✅ Acceptance Criteria

Category	Requirement	Status
Metadata	Extract title, meta description, and h1	Passed
Validation	Reject missing or invalid URLs	Passed
Timeout	Abort after 20 seconds	Passed
Headless Runtime	No GUI dependencies	Passed
Bonus	User-Agent override	Passed

💻 Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• npm 9+
• Chromium auto-download via Puppeteer
• Local or cloud runtime capable of Node.js execution

⚙️ Installation & Setup

• Clone repository
• Install Node dependencies
• Start Next.js development server
• Call API using browser, curl, or Postman

🔗 API Documentation

• Method: GET
• Endpoint: /api/scrape
• Parameters:
  • url – target page (required)
  • ua – custom user agent (optional)
• Returns structured JSON with SEO metadata and status

🖥️ UI / Frontend

This project exposes a minimal Next.js frontend for hosting but operates primarily as an API. UI files (layout.tsx, page.tsx, globals.css) are used for base Next.js rendering and can be extended to provide dashboards, monitoring, or request testing tools.

🔢 Status Codes

Code	Description
200	Successful extraction
400	Invalid or missing URL
504	Timeout
500	Scraping failure

🚀 Features

Category	Capability	Technical Description	Business Impact
Headless Scraping	Chromium Automation	Puppeteer launches isolated Chromium instances per request, enabling JavaScript-rendered pages to be scraped reliably.	Supports modern SPAs and JS-heavy marketing pages.
SEO Intelligence	Metadata Extraction	Reads title, meta description, and H1 from DOM for SEO auditing and lead intelligence.	Improves marketing analysis and competitor research.
Reliability	Timeout Guard	Promise.race based timeout enforcement aborts slow or hanging pages after 20 seconds.	Prevents resource exhaustion in production.
Stealth Mode	User-Agent Spoofing	Optional UA override bypasses bot detection and CDN filtering.	Higher scrape success on protected sites.
Cloud Ready	Serverless Execution	Runs on Vercel Node.js runtime with no browser GUI.	Zero-ops deployment.

Client → URL Request → Headless Chromium → DOM Scan → SEO Metadata → JSON Response

🧱 Tech Stack & Architecture

Layer	Technology	Purpose
API Gateway	Next.js App Router	Exposes REST endpoint, request validation, response formatting
Execution Engine	Node.js Runtime	Controls Puppeteer lifecycle
Browser Automation	Puppeteer + Chromium	Loads web pages, executes JS, reads DOM
Data Layer	In-Memory Objects	Holds extracted metadata before JSON serialization

 ┌────────────┐
 │   Client   │
 └─────┬──────┘
       │
       ▼
┌──────────────┐
│ Next.js API  │
│ Validation   │
│ Timeout Ctrl │
└─────┬────────┘
      │
      ▼
┌──────────────┐
│ Puppeteer    │
│ Controller   │
└─────┬────────┘
      │
      ▼
┌──────────────┐
│ Headless     │
│ Chromium     │
└─────┬────────┘
      │
      ▼
┌──────────────┐
│ DOM Extract  │
│ title / h1   │
└─────┬────────┘
      │
      ▼
  JSON Response

🛠️ Workflow & Implementation

1. Client submits URL to /api/scrape
2. Next.js validates URL format
3. Puppeteer launches a new Chromium instance
4. Timeout watchdog starts (20s)
5. Page navigates and waits for network idle
6. DOM is queried for title, meta description, H1
7. Data is serialized into JSON
8. Browser instance is destroyed
9. Response is returned to client

Request
  ↓
Validation
  ↓
Browser Launch
  ↓
Page Load
  ↓
DOM Parse
  ↓
Timeout Guard
  ↓
JSON Output

🧪 Testing & Validation

ID	Area	Command	Expected Output	Explanation
T1	Valid URL	curl /api/scrape?url=example.com	200 + metadata	Normal scrape
T2	Invalid URL	curl /api/scrape?url=bad	400	Validation check
T3	Timeout	curl slow IP	504	Timeout enforcement

🔍 Validation Summary

• All request paths validated before execution
• Timeout logic prevents infinite execution
• Error codes mapped to HTTP semantics
• UA override verified in runtime testing
• Compatible with serverless deployment

🧯 Troubleshooting & Debugging

• Timeouts → Check target website latency
• Chromium errors → Use no-sandbox flags in restricted environments
• 400 errors → Verify URL format

🔒 Security & Secrets

• No credentials stored
• Sandboxed Chromium execution
• .env support for future tokens

☁️ Deployment

• Deploy to Vercel as Next.js serverless API
• Supports Node.js production servers

⚡ Quick-Start Cheat Sheet

• npm install
• npm run dev
• Call /api/scrape

🧾 Usage Notes

• Designed for SEO audits, marketing intelligence, and automation
• Supports single-page requests for high reliability
• Should be fronted by rate-limiters in production

🧠 Performance & Optimization

Network-idle waits, strict timeouts, and minimal DOM extraction ensure low-latency and controlled resource usage.

🌟 Enhancements & Features

• Multi-page crawling
• Content extraction
• Screenshot capture

🧩 Maintenance & Future Work

• Headless browser upgrades
• Rate limiting
• Cache layers

🏆 Key Achievements

• Production-ready scraping API
• Serverless-compatible design
• Strict SLA enforcement

🧮 High-Level Architecture

User
  │
  ▼
API Gateway (Next.js)
  │
  ▼
Input Validation
  │
  ▼
Execution Controller
  │
  ▼
Headless Browser
  │
  ▼
Target Website
  │
  ▼
DOM Analyzer
  │
  ▼
Metadata Normalizer
  │
  ▼
JSON Formatter
  │
  ▼
Client Response

🗂️ Project Structure

MICRO-SCRAPER/
│
├── app/
│   ├── api/
│   │   └── scrape/
│   │       └── route.ts   (Scraping controller)
│   ├── globals.css       (Global styles)
│   ├── layout.tsx        (Next.js layout)
│   └── page.tsx          (Base UI)
│
├── public/
├── screenshots/
├── .next/
├── package.json
├── tsconfig.json
├── next.config.ts
├── README.md

🧭 How to Demonstrate Live

npm run dev
curl http://localhost:3000/api/scrape?url=https://example.com

💡 Summary, Closure & Compliance

Micro Scraper complies with modern API engineering, cloud deployment standards, and headless browser execution best practices. It provides a secure, scalable, and reliable way to extract high-value marketing metadata, making it suitable for enterprise automation, SaaS platforms, and AI pipelines.