crawleevspholcus

Apache-2.0 175 26 22,720

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

7,594 1 - Apache-2.0

Feb 15 2020 v1.4.0(2026-03-03 03:58:32 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.

Pholcus is a minimalistic web crawler library written in the Go programming language. It is designed to be flexible and easy to use, and it supports concurrent, distributed, and modular crawling.

Note that Pholcus is documented and maintained in the Chinese language and has no english resources other than the code source itself.

Highlights

populartypescriptextendiblemiddlewaresoutput-pipelineslarge-scaleproxy

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 ( "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/exec" _ "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/spider/standard" // standard spider ) func main() { // create spider object spider := exec.NewSpider(exec.NewTask("demo", "https://www.example.com")) // add a callback for URL route by regex pattern. In this case it's any route: spider.AddRule(".*", "Parse") // Start spider spider.Start() } // define callback here func Parse(self *exec.Spider, doc *goquery.Document) { // callbacks receive HTMl document reference and } ```

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