# Crawly
[](https://travis-ci.com/oltarasenko/crawly)
[](https://coveralls.io/github/oltarasenko/crawly?branch=coveralls)
[](https://hex.pm/packages/crawly) [](https://hex.pm/packages/crawly)
## Overview
Crawly is an application framework for crawling web sites and
extracting structured data which can be used for a wide range of
useful applications, like data mining, information processing or
historical archival.
## Requirements
1. Elixir "~> 1.10"
2. Works on Linux, Windows, OS X and BSD
## Quickstart
1. Add Crawly as a dependencies:
```elixir
# mix.exs
defp deps do
[
{:crawly, "~> 0.12.0"},
{:floki, "~> 0.26.0"}
]
end
```
2. Fetch dependencies: `$ mix deps.get`
3. Create a spider
```elixir
# lib/crawly_example/esl_spider.ex
defmodule EslSpider do
use Crawly.Spider
alias Crawly.Utils
@impl Crawly.Spider
def base_url(), do: "https://www.erlang-solutions.com"
@impl Crawly.Spider
def init(), do: [start_urls: ["https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog.html"]]
@impl Crawly.Spider
def parse_item(response) do
{:ok, document} = Floki.parse_document(response.body)
hrefs = document |> Floki.find("a.more") |> Floki.attribute("href")
requests =
Utils.build_absolute_urls(hrefs, base_url())
|> Utils.requests_from_urls()
title = document |> Floki.find("article.blog_post h1") |> Floki.text()
%{
:requests => requests,
:items => [%{title: title, url: response.request_url}]
}
end
end
```
4. Configure Crawly
- By default, Crawly does not require any configuration. But obviously you will need a configuration for fine tuning the crawls:
```elixir
# in config.exs
config :crawly,
closespider_timeout: 10,
concurrent_requests_per_domain: 8,
middlewares: [
Crawly.Middlewares.DomainFilter,
Crawly.Middlewares.UniqueRequest,
{Crawly.Middlewares.UserAgent, user_agents: ["Crawly Bot"]}
],
pipelines: [
{Crawly.Pipelines.Validate, fields: [:url, :title]},
{Crawly.Pipelines.DuplicatesFilter, item_id: :title},
Crawly.Pipelines.JSONEncoder,
{Crawly.Pipelines.WriteToFile, extension: "jl", folder: "/tmp"}
]
```
5. Start the Crawl:
- `$ iex -S mix`
- `iex(1)> Crawly.Engine.start_spider(EslSpider)`
6. Results can be seen with: `$ cat /tmp/EslSpider.jl`
## Browser rendering
Crawly can be configured in the way that all fetched pages will be browser rendered,
which can be very useful if you need to extract data from pages which has lots
of asynchronous elements (for example parts loaded by AJAX).
You can read more here:
- [Browser Rendering](https://hexdocs.pm/crawly/basic_concepts.html#browser-rendering)
## Experimental UI
The CrawlyUI project is an add-on that aims to provide an interface for managing and rapidly developing spiders.
Checkout the code from [GitHub](https://github.com/oltarasenko/crawly_ui)
or try it online [CrawlyUIDemo](http://crawlyui.com)
See more at [Experimental UI](https://hexdocs.pm/crawly/experimental_ui.html#content)
## Documentation
- [API Reference](https://hexdocs.pm/crawly/api-reference.html#content)
- [Quickstart](https://hexdocs.pm/crawly/readme.html#quickstart)
- [Tutorial](https://hexdocs.pm/crawly/tutorial.html)
## Roadmap
1. [x] Pluggable HTTP client
2. [x] Retries support
3. [x] Cookies support
4. [x] XPath support - can be actually done with meeseeks
5. [ ] Project generators (spiders)
6. [ ] UI for jobs management
## Articles
1. Blog post on Erlang Solutions website: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/web-scraping-with-elixir.html
2. Blog post about using Crawly inside a machine learning project with Tensorflow (Tensorflex): https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/how-to-build-a-machine-learning-project-in-elixir.html
3. Web scraping with Crawly and Elixir. Browser rendering: https://medium.com/@oltarasenko/web-scraping-with-elixir-and-crawly-browser-rendering-afcaacf954e8
## Example projects
1. Blog crawler: https://github.com/oltarasenko/crawly-spider-example
2. E-commerce websites: https://github.com/oltarasenko/products-advisor
3. Car shops: https://github.com/oltarasenko/crawly-cars
4. JavaScript based website (Splash example): https://github.com/oltarasenko/autosites
## Contributors
We would gladly accept your contributions!
## Documentation
Please find documentation on the [HexDocs](https://hexdocs.pm/crawly/)
## Production usages
Using Crawly on production? Please let us know about your case!
