The Ultimate Ruby Scraping Stack: From Nokogiri to Ferrum

Web scraping in Ruby isn't a "one size fits all" task. If you use a headless browser for a static site, you’re wasting CPU. If you use Nokogiri for a React app, you’ll get zero data. Here is the professional decision tree for choosing your scraping strategy. 1. The Decision Tree Does the page return HTML directly? → Use Nokogiri . Is it a JavaScript Single Page App (SPA)? → Check the Network Tab for an API. Is the data hidden behind complex JS/User Interaction? → Use Ferrum . Are you scraping thousands of pages? → Use Kimurai . 2. Level 1: The Speed King (HTTP + Nokogiri) If the data is in the source code (View Source), don't overcomplicate it. Nokogiri is a C-extension based parser that is incredibly fast. The Stack: HTTP (gem) + Nokogiri require 'http' require 'nokogiri' response = HTTP . get ( "https://news.ycombinator.com/" ) doc = Nokogiri :: HTML ( response . body ) doc . css ( '.titleline > a' ). each do | link | puts " #{ link . text } : #{ link [ 'href' ] } " end Why it wins: