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Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

crawlee.dev

51–60 of 86 posts

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#51
post #49
post #47

This looks really great. However, I can't find examples of how to handle scraping behind a login or a paywall, without having to 'type' credentials every time.

Just found this on the Apify documentation: https://docs.apify.com/tutorials/log-into-a-website-using-pu... Is there a similar guide for Crawlee?

The example uses Crawlee already, you can just remove the

import { Actor } from 'apify';

and then all references to Actor and either remove them or replace them with Crawlee functions.

E.g. await Actor.openKeyValueStore() should be replaced with KeyValueStore.open()

It makes sense to add a separate example for Crawlee though. But it's true that it does not exist yet.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#52
Looks pretty cool. I'm working on a project that relies on regularly scraping large amounts of data. My codebase uses nodejs, and I'd love to try out a few of the features listed under "Helpful utils and configurability" as they might be able to solve a few pain points I have.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#53
post #10

Hi! It looks really REALLY cool! Is there any kind of detection/stealthiness benchmark compared to libraries such as puppeteer-stealth or fakebrowser? Honestly no matter how feature-complete and powerful a scraping tool is, the main "selling point" for me will always be stealthiness/human like behavior no matter how crappy the dev experience is.(and IMHO that's the same for most serious scrapers/bot makers) Will it a…

Hey! Crawlee uses the libraries from our fingerprint suite internally. https://github.com/apify/fingerprint-suite#performance It has an A rating in the BotD (fingerprint.js) detection. Now we're working on improving the CreepJS detection. That one is really tough though. Not even sure if anybody would use it in production environments as it must throw a lot of false positives. It will always be free and maintained, b…

Hi! Very cool project. Just out of curiosity, what trips up Crawlee on CreepJS? I haven't heard of anyone actually using it in production (actually don't think it's meant for production use). It's certainly overzealous in its aggregate "trust score", but (a) it seems like a good benchmark to aim for; (b) some of its sub-scores, like "stealth" and "like headless", might be helpful for Crawlee to evaluate, given the signals included in those analyses are fairly simple for people to throw together in their own custom (production) bot detection scripts and are somewhat ubiquitous.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#54

Looks pretty cool. I'm working on a project that relies on regularly scraping large amounts of data. My codebase uses nodejs, and I'd love to try out a few of the features listed under "Helpful utils and configurability" as they might be able to solve a few pain points I have.

Nice! Good luck with your project. The parsers are available under the utils.social namespace: https://crawlee.dev/api/utils/namespace/social The headless browser utils are under puppeteer and playwright utils https://crawlee.dev/api/puppeteer-crawler/namespace/puppetee...

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#56
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Crawlee uses the libraries from our fingerprint suite internally. https://github.com/apify/fingerprint-suite#performance It has an A rating in the BotD (fingerprint.js) detection. Now we're working on improving the CreepJS detection. That one is really tough though. Not even sure if anybody would use it in production environments as it must throw a lot of false positives. It will always be free and maintained, b…

Hi! Very cool project. Just out of curiosity, what trips up Crawlee on CreepJS? I haven't heard of anyone actually using it in production (actually don't think it's meant for production use). It's certainly overzealous in its aggregate "trust score", but (a) it seems like a good benchmark to aim for; (b) some of its sub-scores, like "stealth" and "like headless", might be helpful for Crawlee to evaluate, given the si…

With fingerprints it's a tradeoff between having enough of them for large scale scraping and staying consistent with your environment. E.g. you can get exponentially more combinations if you also use Firefox, Webkit, MacOS and Windows user-agents (and prints) when you're running Chrome on Linux, but you also expose yourself to the better detection algorithms. If you stick to Linux Chrome only prints (which is what you usually run in VMs), you'll be less detectable, but might get rate limited.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#57
post #55

Is there a way to use Apify's paid proxies without paying for the hosting? That doesn't look like option on the website.

Yeah, sure. We don't advertise it, but if you get in touch with us on support@apify.com or through the chat widget, we can create a proxy-only plan for you.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#58

Looks like you took the good ideas from Scrapy's crawling engine and combined it with a great scraping API, which is all I ever wanted in a bot framework! I'm especially excited about the unified API for browser and HTML scraping, which is something I've had to hack on top of Scrapy in the past and it really wasn't a good experience. That, along with puppeteer-heap-snapshot, will make the common case of "we need this…

people trash JavaScript while using python? They should look at the mirror!

Anyone can trash js except for all these C like languages with boringly similar designs, doubly so for python. Itself took over the world due to the fact that amateur (scientists and other professions as opposed to programmers) can easily play with it.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

#60

I see you basically recommend bypassing rate limits by using proxies etc? Why not just respect rate limits if set properly? A little bit of consideration for what/whomever is on the other end ;)

I get your point and I don't have an objective answer to it. We believe that internet is an open medium and there's immense value for humankind waiting to be discovered and unlocked in all its data. After all, many of the big tech companies in the world utilize web scraping heavily.

Rate limits can be applied for different reasons. If they protect the website from being overloaded, they are good in our opinion. If they protect it from competition, research or building new non-competitive, but valuable products that are not harmful to the original website, they are not ideal.

We leave that to the user to decide the ethics of their project and just provide the tools.

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