see-link
v2.0.1
Published
See-a-link! Get the preview metadata of the given link
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See-Link
See-a-Link! Get the preview metadata like title, description, image, video, etc from a link or a link extracted from the given text.
See-Link looks through the open-graph, twitter cards markup and other meta tags to get the preview information from the link. It visits a link in a headless browser and scrapes the required information. It can also return the dominant color of the page in case the theme-color
is needed but no meta info is found.
To know more about how See-Link works checkout this wiki.
Check out this article to know about meta tags, SEO and their need for generating link previews.
Table of Contents
Features
- Get the dominant color of the page if required.
- Can return images present in html body incase meta tags are not available.
- Can be customized to return the info as per the requirement.
- Uses stealth measures and user-agent can be customized to bypass restrictions setup by sites to prevent bot scraping.
NOTE
A different domain cannot be requested from your web app (browsers block cross-origin-requests). If you do not know how same-origin-policy works, here is a great article, therefore this library works on node (back-end environments) and certain mobile run-times (like react-native).
This library fetches the website and parses its html using puppeteer, as if the user would visit the page. This means that some websites might redirect you to a sign-up page. You can try to change the user-agent property (by default it uses Facebook's user agent) and the response you get then might be different, but there is nothing wrong with this library.
Getting Started
npm install see-link
Usage
Its quite simple:
const seeLink = require('see-link');
(async () => {
const preview = await seeLink('https://www.bharatsharma.me');
// You can directly pass a url as above or pass a chunk of text
// and seeLink will extract the first link from it. Like this:
const preview_text = await seeLink('This text will be parsed by seeLink https://www.bharatsharma.me');
console.log(preview);
})();
The above code will result in the following output:
{
title: 'Bharat Sharma',
description: 'Personal website of Bharat Sharma',
image: 'https://bharatsharma.me/assets/images/logo.png',
domainName: 'bharatsharma.me'
}
API
function seeLink(url: string, options?: seeLink.Options): Promise<SeeLinkRes>
seeLink
takes a url
and options
object (optional). The url
string can be any link or a text containing a link. It rejects with an error if there was no URL in the text provided.
seeLink
returns a promise that resolves to the preview metadata of the following type:
SeeLinkRes {
title: string;
description: string;
image: string;
domainName: string;
video?: string;
themeColor?: string;
favIcon?: string;
type?: string;
}
Options
Additionally you can pass an options object to the function to change the default behaviour:
| Option Name | Function | Type |
|-------------|-----------|------|
| detailedPreview | Get all the possible metadata supported by the see-link (eg: video, theme-color, type, favIcon) | boolean |
| getVideo | Get the video metadata along with the default result | boolean |
| getThemeColor | Get the theme-color
metadata along with the default result | boolean |
| getDominantThemeColor | When getThemeColor
is set to true and no theme-color
meta info is found then get the dominant color of the page. By default it's true
| boolean |
| args | Arguments to pass to the puppeteer.launch
function | string[] |
| userAgent | User-Agent to use when visiting the website | string |
| timeout | Timeout in milliseconds for the request | number |
| executablePath | Path to the chrome/chromium executable | string |
| headless | Whether to run the browser in headless mode | boolean |
Test
The library is tested using Mocha and Chai. You can run the tests by running the following command in the project root:
./test.sh
If bash: ./test.sh: Permission denied
error is thrown, you can make the test executable by running the following command:
chmod +x test.sh
Alternatively, you can run the tests by running the following commands in the project root:
npm run-script test-server
then in another terminal run the following command:
npm test
NOTE: The test server runs on port 3000
by default. You can change the port number in test_setup/config.js
file.
License
See-Link is released under the MIT License.