Basic Web Scraper Built With Power Automate for Desktop

A functional web scraper with complete flow actions. Showing how to scrape websites, traverse links and download content.
How It Works

This is a non-interactive web scraper, meaning that it does not use browser automation (Chrome, Edge, Firefox) for scraping. Instead, all web page requests are sent with the Download from web flow action.

Instructions
  • Line 1: Insert the url to be scraped.
  • Line 2: Set a folder where files should be downloaded to.
  • Line 3: (Optional) Change file extensions that should be downloaded.
  • Line 4: (Optional) Change the custom user agent header that is sent to websites.
  • Line 5: (Optional) Change MaxPageRequests (default is 30)
  • Line 6: (Optional) Change MaxFileRequests (default is 50)
Limits

The scaper has following limits:

  • Scraping only static html content (so no JavaScript content).
  • The target website must use absolute urls (could be improved to understand relative urls).
Notes
  • This scraper does not obey robots.txt. If you plan to use this on a website you don’t have ownership to, then you should comply with their robots.txt. Do not scrape Disallowed Pages and obey Crawl-Delay.
  • Do not perform malicious activities.
  • Wait 1 flow action have been added after each webpage request (the flow will wait for one second after each request). Many websites do run on shared hosts with limited resources and they deserve our understanding. This is the minimum wait value that should be used.
PAG Admin
Flow Variables
Flow Datatypes
Also See These Flows
Flow Action
Use Power Automate Desktop as a Web Scraper for Excel

Update existing Excel spreadsheet with information pulled from any webpage.

PAG Admin

882

Flow Action
Backup Your Photos and Videos Using Password Protected Zip Files

Easily create backup archive files that can be shared via email or uploaded to a server for backup purposes.

PAG Admin

273

Flow Action
Visit Web Pages Found With Duckduckgo

Run DuckDuckGo in Chrome and visit first three links. Create a variable for CSS selectors to be able to click different links using an incremental loop counter.

PAG Admin

263

Flow Action
Run Flow From Command Prompt or Windows Task Scheduler

A simple way to run flows from Command Line, Windows Task Scheduler, shortcut keys or by using a URL.

PAG Admin

8,747

Flow Action
Find Text From Images Using Google Vision AI and OCR

This walkthrough shows all the steps it takes to analyze text from images with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) using Power Automate Desktop.

PAG Admin

696