Extracting LinkedIn Post Messages with a Web Agent

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a web agent that automates the extraction of LinkedIn articles from a specific organization, utilizing Chrome browser and custom data for scraping.

This approach is particularly useful when platforms don’t provide APIs for data access. Interestingly, OpenAI has recently introduced Operator, a cutting-edge agent that can perform tasks using its own browser. Check out the research preview https://openai.com/index/introducing-operator/.

For this tutorial, we’ll be using the framework from https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use. I’ll make some minor adjustments to ensure seamless integration with my own Chrome browser.

Step by Step

Let’s begin by creating a Python environment variable using Conda.

conda create --name browser-use python=3.11
conda activate browser-use

Install the library.

pip install browser-use

Install Playwright.

playwright install

Next, we’ll update the browser.py file by modifying the _setup_browser_with_instance method. Without making this change, I encountered issues connecting to my Chrome browser smoothly.

"""
Playwright browser on…