crawleevscolly

Apache-2.0 175 26 22,720

341.9 thousand (month) Apr 22 2022 3.16.0(2026-04-09 07:36:53 ago)

25,231 7 187 Apache-2.0

May 14 2018 v2.2.0(2025-03-27 10:47:28 ago)

Crawlee is a modern web scraping and browser automation framework for JavaScript and TypeScript, built by Apify. It is the successor to the Apify SDK and provides a unified interface for building reliable web scrapers and crawlers that can scale from simple scripts to large-scale data extraction projects.

Crawlee supports multiple crawling strategies through different crawler classes:

CheerioCrawler For fast, lightweight HTML scraping using Cheerio (no browser needed). Best for static pages.
PlaywrightCrawler Uses Playwright for full browser automation. Handles JavaScript-rendered pages, SPAs, and complex interactions.
PuppeteerCrawler Similar to PlaywrightCrawler but uses Puppeteer as the browser automation backend.
HttpCrawler Minimal crawler for raw HTTP requests without HTML parsing.

Key features include:

Automatic request queue management with configurable concurrency and rate limiting
Built-in proxy rotation with session management
Persistent request queue and dataset storage (local or cloud via Apify)
Automatic retry and error handling with configurable strategies
TypeScript-first design with full type safety
Middleware-like request/response hooks (preNavigationHooks, postNavigationHooks)
Output pipelines for storing extracted data
Easy deployment to Apify cloud platform

Crawlee is considered the most feature-complete web scraping framework in the JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem, comparable to Python's Scrapy but with native browser automation support.

Colly is a popular web scraping library for the Go programming language. It's designed to be fast and easy to use, and it provides a simple and flexible API for traversing and extracting information from websites.

Colly supports:

Concurrent scraping with a simple API
Automatic handling of cookies and sessions
Automatic handling of redirects
Support for parsing HTML and XML
Support for parsing JSON and binary data
Support for custom storage (e.g. scraping results to a database)
Simple JavaScript rendering with Colly's built-in rendering engine.

Colly also provides several optional features, such as support for user-agents, delay between requests, rate-limiting and proxy usage.

Colly's API is quite simple, and it is easy to get started with basic web scraping tasks. It's a good choice for scraping moderate to heavy sites, and it can be useful for a wide range of use cases, such as data mining, content extraction, and more.

Additionally, you can use it together with Goquery, a library that allow you to make jquery like queries on HTML documents and it is often used together with Colly to ease the way of parsing the HTML.

Highlights

populartypescriptextendiblemiddlewaresoutput-pipelineslarge-scaleproxy

popularcss-selectorsxpath-selectorscommunity-toolsoutput-pipelinesmiddlewaresasyncproductionlarge-scale

Example Use

```javascript import { PlaywrightCrawler, Dataset } from 'crawlee'; // Create a crawler with Playwright for JS rendering const crawler = new PlaywrightCrawler({ // Limit concurrency to avoid overwhelming the target maxConcurrency: 5, // This function is called for each URL async requestHandler({ request, page, enqueueLinks }) { const title = await page.title(); // Extract data from the page const products = await page.$$eval('.product', (els) => els.map((el) => ({ name: el.querySelector('.name')?.textContent, price: el.querySelector('.price')?.textContent, })) ); // Store extracted data await Dataset.pushData({ url: request.url, title, products, }); // Follow links to crawl more pages await enqueueLinks({ globs: ['https://example.com/products/**'], }); }, }); // Start crawling await crawler.run(['https://example.com/products']); ```

```go package main import ( "fmt" "github.com/gocolly/colly/v2" ) func main() { // Instantiate default collector c := colly.NewCollector( // Visit only domains: hackerspaces.org, wiki.hackerspaces.org colly.AllowedDomains("hackerspaces.org", "wiki.hackerspaces.org"), ) // On every a element which has href attribute call callback c.OnHTML("a[href]", func(e *colly.HTMLElement) { link := e.Attr("href") // Print link fmt.Printf("Link found: %q -> %s\n", e.Text, link) // Visit link found on page // Only those links are visited which are in AllowedDomains c.Visit(e.Request.AbsoluteURL(link)) }) // Before making a request print "Visiting ..." c.OnRequest(func(r *colly.Request) { fmt.Println("Visiting", r.URL.String()) }) // Start scraping on https://hackerspaces.org c.Visit("https://hackerspaces.org/") } ```

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