Skip to content

dataflowkitvsgerapy

BSD-3-Clause 4 3 663
Feb 09 2017 2024-12-03(6 days ago)
3,362 4 72 MIT
Jul 04 2017 1.7 thousand (month) 0.9.13(1 year, 4 months ago)

Dataflow kit ("DFK") is a Web Scraping framework for Gophers. It extracts data from web pages, following the specified CSS Selectors. You can use it in many ways for data mining, data processing or archiving.

Web-scraping pipeline consists of 3 general components:

  • Downloading an HTML web-page. (Fetch Service)
  • Parsing an HTML page and retrieving data we're interested in (Parse Service)
  • Encoding parsed data to CSV, MS Excel, JSON, JSON Lines or XML format.

For fetching dataflowkit has several types of page fetchers:

  • Base fetcher uses standard golang http client to fetch pages as is. It works faster than Chrome fetcher. But Base fetcher cannot render dynamic javascript driven web pages.
  • Chrome fetcher is intended for rendering dynamic javascript based content. It sends requests to Chrome running in headless mode.

For parsing dataflowkit extracts data from downloaded web page following the rules listed in configuration JSON file. Extracted data is returned in CSV, MS Excel, JSON or XML format.

Some dataflowkit features:

  • Scraping of JavaScript generated pages;
  • Data extraction from paginated websites;
  • Processing infinite scrolled pages.
  • Sсraping of websites behind login form;
  • Cookies and sessions handling;
  • Following links and detailed pages processing;
  • Managing delays between requests per domain;
  • Following robots.txt directives;
  • Saving intermediate data in Diskv or Mongodb. Storage interface is flexible enough to add more storage types easily;
  • Encode results to CSV, MS Excel, JSON(Lines), XML formats;
  • Dataflow kit is fast. It takes about 4-6 seconds to fetch and then parse 50 pages.
  • Dataflow kit is suitable to process quite large volumes of data. Our tests show the time needed to parse appr. 4 millions of pages is about 7 hours.

Gerapy is a Distributed Crawler Management Framework Based on Scrapy, Scrapyd, Scrapyd-Client, Scrapyd-API, Django and Vue.js.

It is built on top of the Scrapy framework and provides a simple and easy-to-use interface for performing web scraping tasks. Gerapy also includes features such as support for scheduling and distributed crawling, as well as a built-in web-based dashboard for monitoring and managing scraping tasks. Additionally, Gerapy is designed to be highly extensible, allowing users to easily create custom plugins and integrations.

Overall, Gerapy is a useful tool for those looking to automate web scraping tasks and extract data from websites.

Example Use


Dataflowkit uses JSON configuration like:
{
  "name": "collection",
  "request": {
      "url": "https://example.com"
  },
  "fields": [
      {
          "name": "Title",
          "selector": ".product-container a",
          "extractor": {
              "types": [
                  "text",
                  "href"
              ],
              "filters": [
                  "trim",
                  "lowerCase"
              ],
              "params": {
                  "includeIfEmpty": false
              }
          }
      },
      {
          "name": "Image",
          "selector": "#product-container img",
          "extractor": {
              "types": [
                  "alt",
                  "src",
                  "width",
                  "height"
              ],
              "filters": [
                  "trim",
                  "upperCase"
              ]
          }
      },
      {
          "name": "Buyinfo",
          "selector": ".buy-info",
          "extractor": {
              "types": [
                  "text"
              ],
              "params": {
                  "includeIfEmpty": false
              }
          }
      }
  ],
  "paginator": {
      "selector": ".next",
      "attr": "href",
      "maxPages": 3
  },
  "format": "json",
  "fetcherType": "chrome",
  "paginateResults": false
}
which is then ingested through CLI command.

Alternatives / Similar


Was this page helpful?