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

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

#51

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.

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

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

#52
post #17

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 e…

How does it compare to selenium for python?

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

#53
post #30
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

I've been working on a crawler recently and honestly you need the flexibility middleware gives you. You can only get so far with reasonable defaults, crawling isn't a one-size fits all kinda thing.

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

#54
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I've been working on a crawler recently and honestly you need the flexibility middleware gives you. You can only get so far with reasonable defaults, crawling isn't a one-size fits all kinda thing.

Crawlee isn’t any less configurable than Scrapy. It just uses different, in my personal opinion more approachable, patterns. It makes it easier to start with, but you can tweak whatever you want. Btw, you can add middleware in Crawlee Router.

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

#55
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.

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

#56
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on a crawler recently and honestly you need the flexibility middleware gives you. You can only get so far with reasonable defaults, crawling isn't a one-size fits all kinda thing.

Crawlee isn’t any less configurable than Scrapy. It just uses different, in my personal opinion more approachable, patterns. It makes it easier to start with, but you can tweak whatever you want. Btw, you can add middleware in Crawlee Router.

> Crawlee isn’t any less configurable than Scrapy.

Oh, then I have obviously overlooked how one would be able to determined if a proxy has been blocked and evict it from the pool https://github.com/rejoiceinhope/scrapy-proxy-pool/blob/b833...> . Or how to use an HTTP cache independent of the "browser" cache (e.g. to allow short-circuiting the actual request if I can prove it is not stale for my needs, which enables recrawls to fix logic bugs or even downloading the actual request-response payloads for making better tests) https://docs.scrapy.org/en/2.11/topics/downloader-middleware...

Unless you meant what I said about "pip install -e && echo glhf" in which case, yes, it's a "simple matter of programming" into a framework that was not designed to be extended

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

#57
post #56
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crawlee isn’t any less configurable than Scrapy. It just uses different, in my personal opinion more approachable, patterns. It makes it easier to start with, but you can tweak whatever you want. Btw, you can add middleware in Crawlee Router.

> Crawlee isn’t any less configurable than Scrapy. Oh, then I have obviously overlooked how one would be able to determined if a proxy has been blocked and evict it from the pool https://github.com/rejoiceinhope/scrapy-proxy-pool/blob/b833... > . Or how to use an HTTP cache independent of the "browser" cache (e.g. to allow short-circuiting the actual request if I can prove it is not stale for my needs, which enables…

Cache management is also what I had in mind. Ive been using golang+colly and the default caching behavior is just different enough from what I need. I haven't written a custom cache middleware, but I'm getting to that point.

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

#58
post #31

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 w…

> but your cutesy coding style makes that a non-starter

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

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

#59
post #31

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 w…

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

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

#60
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

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