php-spidervskimurai
php-spider is a PHP library for web crawling and scraping. It allows developers to easily navigate and extract data from websites by simulating a web browser's behavior.
- supports two traversal algorithms: breadth-first and depth-first
- supports crawl depth limiting, queue size limiting and max downloads limiting
- supports adding custom URI discovery logic, based on XPath, CSS selectors, or plain old PHP
- comes with a useful set of URI filters, such as Domain limiting
- supports custom URI filters, both prefetch (URI) and postfetch (Resource content)
- supports custom request handling logic
- supports Basic, Digest and NTLM HTTP authentication. See example.
- comes with a useful set of persistence handlers (memory, file)
- supports custom persistence handlers
- collects statistics about the crawl for reporting
- dispatches useful events, allowing developers to add even more custom behavior
- supports a politeness policy
This Spider does not support Javascript.
Kimurai is a modern web scraping framework for Ruby, inspired by Python's Scrapy. It provides a structured approach to building web scrapers with built-in support for multiple browser engines, session management, and data pipelines.
Key features include:
- Multiple engine support Can use different backends depending on the scraping needs: Mechanize for simple HTTP requests, Selenium with headless Chrome/Firefox for JavaScript-rendered pages, and Poltergeist (PhantomJS) for lightweight rendering.
- Scrapy-like architecture Follows the spider pattern: define a spider class with start URLs and parsing methods, and the framework handles crawling, scheduling, and data collection.
- Built-in data pipelines Save scraped data to JSON, CSV, or custom formats with configurable output pipelines.
- Session management Maintains browser sessions with automatic cookie handling and configurable delays between requests.
- Request scheduling Built-in request queue with configurable concurrency, delays, and retry logic.
- CLI tools Command-line tools for generating new spiders, running individual spiders, and managing scraping projects.
Kimurai is the closest Ruby equivalent to Scrapy. It's well-suited for structured scraping projects that need organization, multiple spiders, and data pipeline processing.
Note: Kimurai has not seen active development recently, but it remains a useful framework for Ruby scraping projects and is included as the most complete Ruby scraping framework available.
Highlights
middlewaresoutput-pipelines
Example Use
```php
use Example\StatsHandler;
use VDB\Spider\Discoverer\XPathExpressionDiscoverer;
use Symfony\Contracts\EventDispatcher\Event;
use VDB\Spider\Event\SpiderEvents;
use VDB\Spider\Spider;
require_once('example_complex_bootstrap.php');
// Create Spider
$spider = new Spider('http://dmoztools.net');
// Add a URI discoverer. Without it, the spider does nothing. In this case, we want tags from a certain
$spider->getDiscovererSet()->set(new XPathExpressionDiscoverer("//div[@id='catalogs']//a"));
// Set some sane options for this example. In this case, we only get the first 10 items from the start page.
$spider->getDiscovererSet()->maxDepth = 1;
$spider->getQueueManager()->maxQueueSize = 10;
// Let's add something to enable us to stop the script
$spider->getDispatcher()->addListener(
SpiderEvents::SPIDER_CRAWL_USER_STOPPED,
function (Event $event) {
echo "\nCrawl aborted by user.\n";
exit();
}
);
// Add a listener to collect stats to the Spider and the QueueMananger.
// There are more components that dispatch events you can use.
$statsHandler = new StatsHandler();
$spider->getQueueManager()->getDispatcher()->addSubscriber($statsHandler);
$spider->getDispatcher()->addSubscriber($statsHandler);
// Execute crawl
$spider->crawl();
// Build a report
echo "\n ENQUEUED: " . count($statsHandler->getQueued());
echo "\n SKIPPED: " . count($statsHandler->getFiltered());
echo "\n FAILED: " . count($statsHandler->getFailed());
echo "\n PERSISTED: " . count($statsHandler->getPersisted());
// Finally we could do some processing on the downloaded resources
// In this example, we will echo the title of all resources
echo "\n\nDOWNLOADED RESOURCES: ";
foreach ($spider->getDownloader()->getPersistenceHandler() as $resource) {
echo "\n - " . $resource->getCrawler()->filterXpath('//title')->text();
}
```
```ruby
require 'kimurai'
class ProductSpider < Kimurai::Base
@name = 'product_spider'
@engine = :selenium_chrome # or :mechanize for simple pages
@start_urls = ['https://example.com/products']
def parse(response, url:, data: {})
# Extract product data from current page
response.css('.product').each do |product|
item = {
name: product.css('.name').text.strip,
price: product.css('.price').text.strip,
url: absolute_url(product.at_css('a')['href'], base: url),
}
# Send item to the pipeline
save_to "products.json", item, format: :json
end
# Follow pagination links
if next_page = response.at_css('a.next-page')
request_to :parse, url: absolute_url(next_page['href'], base: url)
end
end
end
# Run the spider
ProductSpider.crawl!
```
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