Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library

by jancurn • 2 years ago

254 57 2 years ago

Hey all,

This is Jan, the founder of Apify (https://apify.com/) — a full-stack web scraping platform. After the success of Crawlee for JavaScript (https://github.com/apify/crawlee/) and the demand from the Python community, we're launching Crawlee for Python today!

The main features are:

- A unified programming interface for both HTTP (HTTPX with BeautifulSoup) & headless browser crawling (Playwright)

- Automatic parallel crawling based on available system resources

- Written in Python with type hints for enhanced developer experience

- Automatic retries on errors or when you’re getting blocked

- Integrated proxy rotation and session management

- Configurable request routing - direct URLs to the appropriate handlers

- Persistent queue for URLs to crawl

- Pluggable storage for both tabular data and files

For details, you can read the announcement blog post: https://crawlee.dev/blog/launching-crawlee-python

Our team and I will be happy to answer here any questions you might have.

marban• 2 years ago

Nice list, but what would be the arguments for switching over from other libraries? I’ve built my own crawler over time, but from what I see, there’s nothing truly unique.

jancurn6• 2 years ago

The main advantage (for now) is that the library has a single interface for both HTTP and headless browsers, and bundled auto scaling. You can write your crawlers using the same base abstraction, and the framework takes care of this heavy lifting. Developers of scrapers shouldn't need to reinvent the wheel, and just focus on building the "business" logic of their scrapers. Having said that, if you wrote your own crawling library, the motivation to use Crawlee might be lower, and that's fair enough.

Please note that this is the first release, and we'll keep adding many more features as we go, including anti-blocking, adaptive crawling, etc. To see where this might go, check https://github.com/apify/crawlee

robertlagrant4• 2 years ago

Can I ask - what is anti-blocking?

intev• 2 years ago

How is this different from Scrapy?

sauain4• 2 years ago

hey intev,

- Crawlee has out-of-the-box support for headless browser crawling (Playwright). You don't have to install any plugin or set up the middleware. - Crawlee has a minimalistic & elegant interface - Set up your scraper with fewer than 10 lines of code. You don't have to care about what middleware, settings, and anything are or need to be changed, on the top that we also have templates which makes the learning curve much smaller. - Complete type hint coverage. Which is something Scrapy hasn't completed yet. - Based on standard Asyncio. Integrating Scrapy into a classic asyncio app requires integration of Twisted and asyncio. Which is possible, but not easy, and can result in troubles.

mdaniel3• 2 years ago

You don't have to install any plugin or set up the middleware.

That cuts both ways, in true 80/20 fashion: it also means that anyone who isn't on the happy path of the way that crawlee was designed is going to have to edit your python files (`pip install -e` type business) to achieve their goals

c0brac0bra• 2 years ago

Wanted to say thanks for apify/crawlee. I'm a long-time node.js user and your library has worked better than all the others I've tried.

jancurn6• 2 years ago

Thank you!

ijustlovemath• 2 years ago

Do you have any plans to monetize this? How are you supporting development?

sauain4• 2 years ago

Crawlee is open source and free to use and we don't have any plans to monetize it in future. It will be always free to use.

We provide Apify platform to publish your scrapers as Actors for the developer community, and developers earn money through it. You can use Crawlee for Python as well :)

tldr; Crawlee is and always will be free to use and open sourced.

VagabundoP• 2 years ago

Looks nice, and modern python.

The code example on the front page has this:

`const data = await crawler.get_data()`

That looks like Javascript? Is there a missing underscore?

mnmkng8• 2 years ago

Oh wow, thanks! Will fix it right away. Crawlee is originally a JS library.

ranedk• 2 years ago

I found crawlee a few days ago while figuring out a stack for a project. I wanted a python library but found crawlee with typescript so much easier that I ended up coding the entire project in less than a week in Typescript+Crawlee+Playwright

I found the api a lot better than any python scraping api till date. However I am tempted to try out python with Crawlee.

The playwright integration with gotScraping makes the entire programming experience a breeze. My crawling and scraping involves all kinds of frontend rendered websites with a lot of modified XHR responses to be captured. And IT JUST WORKS!

Thanks a ton . I will definitely use the Apify platform to scale given the integration.

sauain4• 2 years ago

would love to have your feedback on the python one too :)

3abiton• 2 years ago

How does it compare to selenium for python?

renegat0x02• 2 years ago

Can it be used to obtain RSS contents? Most of examples focus on html

sauain4• 2 years ago

I didn't try it, but I don't see a reason why not:

- RSS feed is transferred via HTTP. - BeatifulSoup can parse both HTML & XML.

(RSS uses XML format)

thelastgallon• 2 years ago

I wonder if there are any AI tools that do web scraping for you without having to write any code?

lifesaverluke• 2 years ago

Which site would you like to scrape?

Findecanor• 2 years ago

Does it have support for web scraping opt-out protocols, such as Robots.txt, HTTP and content tags? These are getting more important now, especially in the EU after the DSM directive.

jancurn6• 2 years ago

Not yet, but it’s on the roadmap

mdaniel3• 2 years ago

You'll want to prioritize documenting the existing features, since it's no good having a super awesome full stack web scraping platform if only you can use it. I ordinarily would default to a "read the source" response but your cutesy coding style makes that a non-starter

As a concrete example: command-f for "tier" on https://crawlee.dev/python/docs/guides/proxy-management and tell me how anyone could possibly know what `tiered_proxy_urls: list[list[str]] | None = None` should contain and why?

mnmkng8• 2 years ago

Sorry about the confusion. Some features, like the tiered proxies, are not documented properly. You’re absolutely right. Updates will come soon.

We wanted to have as many features in the initial release as possible, because we have a local Python community conference coming up tomorrow and we wanted to have the library ready for that.

More docs will come soon. I promise. And thanks for the shout.

arresin• 2 years ago

I literally had to go through the entire codebase the documentation is that lacking. It’s boring to document but imo it’s the lowest hanging fruit to get people moving down that crawlee -> appify funnel.

NoThisIsMe• 2 years ago

but your cutesy coding style makes that a non-starter

I don't think this is fair. The code looks pretty readable to me.

ttymck• 2 years ago

Can you link to some of the cutesy code? I've never heard this before.

barrenko• 2 years ago

Pretty cool, and any scraping tool is really welcome - I'll try it out for my personal project. At the monment, due to AI, scraping is like selling shovels during a gold rush.

manishsharan• 2 years ago

Can this work on intranet sites like sharepoint or confluence , which require employee SSO ?

I was trying to build a small Langchain based RAG based on internal documents but getting the documents from sharepoint/confluence (we have both) is very painful.

mnmkng8• 2 years ago

Technically it can. You can log in with the PlaywrightCrawler class without issue. The question is if there’s 2FA as well and how that’s handled. Crawlee does not have any abstraction for handling 2FA as it depends a lot on what verification options are supported on the SSO side. So that part would need a custom implementation within Crawlee.

jancurn6• 2 years ago

For this use case, you might use this ready-made Actor: https://apify.com/apify/website-content-crawler

holoduke• 2 years ago

Does it have event listeners to wait for specific elements based on certain pattern matches. One reason i am still using phantomjs is because it simulates the entire browser and you can compile your own webkit in it.

mnmkng8• 2 years ago

It uses Playwright under the hood, so yes, it can do all of that, and more.

localfirst2• 2 years ago

in one sentence, what does this do that existing web scraping and browser automation doesn't do?

mnmkng8• 2 years ago

In one word. Nothing.

But I personally think it does some things a little easier, a little faster and little more conveniently than the other libraries and tools out there.

Although there’s one thing that the JS version of Crawlee has which unfortunately isn’t in Python yet, but it will be there soon. AFAIK it’s unique among all libraries. It’s automatically detecting whether a headless browser is needed or if HTTP will suffice and using the most performant option.

localfirst2• 2 years ago

is there anything that uses a computer vision model/ocr locally to extract data?

I find some dynamic sites purposefully make it extremely difficult to parse and they obfuscate the XHR calls to their API

I've also seen some websites pollute the data when it detects scraping which results in garbage data but you don't know until its verified

fforflo• 2 years ago

I'd suggest bringing more code snippets from the test cases to documentation as examples.

Nice work though.

bmitc• 2 years ago

Can you use this to auto-logon to systems?

jancurn6• 2 years ago

For sure, simply store cookies after login and then use them to initiate the crawl.

nobodywillobsrv• 2 years ago

I don't really understand it. Tried it on some fund site and it didn't really do much besides apparently grepping for links.

The example should show how to literally find and target all data as in .csv .xlsx tables etc and actually download it.

Anyone can use requests and just get the text and grep for urls. I don't get it.

Remember: pick an example where you need to parse one thing to get 1000s of other things to then hit some other endpoints to then get the 3-5 things at each of those. Any example that doesn't look like that is not going to impress anyone.

I'm not even clear if this is saying it's a framework or actually some automation tool. Automation meaning it actually autodetects where to look.

renegat0x02• 2 years ago

I have been running my project with selenium for some time.

Now I am using crawlee. Thanks. I will work on it, to better integrate into my project, however I already can tell it works flawlessly.

My project, with crawlee: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library

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