Getting website meta tags with node.js!

#node #express #cheerio

Recently I was in need of a way to get meta tags for a service I was creating. So I decided to search GitHub for a solution. Unfortunately, everything either didn't work or was very slow. So here we are.

First off, install node-fetch and cheerio with npm.
Next, we need to fetch the HTML of the website we are getting the meta tags from.

 fetch("https://discord.com")
    .then(result => result.text())
    .then(html => {
        console.log(html);
    }).catch(error => {
        console.log(error);
    })

Now we need to pass this HTML into Cheerio, which will allow us to find meta tags from their attributes.

 fetch("https://discord.com")
    .then(result => result.text())
    .then(html => {
        console.log(html);
+       const $ = cheerio.load(html);
    }).catch(error => {
        console.log(error);
    })

The way we do this is using code like this...

↓ find meta elements with property "og:title"

$('meta[property="og:title"]').attr('content')

get the chosen elements content attribute ↑

After doing this for all the meta tags I had this...

 fetch("https://discord.com")
    .then(result => result.text())
    .then(html => {
        console.log(html);
        const $ = cheerio.load(html);
+       const title = $('meta[property="og:title"]').attr('content') || $('title').text() || $('meta[name="title"]').attr('content')
+       const description = $('meta[property="og:description"]').attr('content') || $('meta[name="description"]').attr('content')
+       const url = $('meta[property="og:url"]').attr('content')
+       const site_name = $('meta[property="og:site_name"]').attr('content')
+       const image = $('meta[property="og:image"]').attr('content') || $('meta[property="og:image:url"]').attr('content')
+       const icon = $('link[rel="icon"]').attr('href') || $('link[rel="shortcut icon"]').attr('href')
+       const keywords = $('meta[property="og:keywords"]').attr('content') || $('meta[name="keywords"]').attr('content')
+       // do something with the variables
    }).catch(error => {
        console.log(error);
    })

You can see the finished product here and view the source on GitHub. A node module is also available here!

Sorry if this article sucked, it was my first time writing on this blog.