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crawleevsgerapy

Apache-2.0 175 26 22,720
341.9 thousand (month) Apr 22 2022 3.16.0(2026-04-09 07:36:53 ago)
3,495 4 74 MIT
Jul 04 2017 514 (month) 0.9.13(2023-07-19 18:53:46 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.

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.

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']); ```

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