Webster

Overview

Webster is a reliable web crawling and scraping framework written with Node.js, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages.

Which is different from other crawling framework is that Webster can scrape the content which rendered by browser client side javascript and ajax request

Quick Start

Let’s start a simple crawler request to google website:

docker pull zhuyingda/webster-playground

docker run --tty -e URL="https://www.google.com/robots.txt" zhuyingda/webster-playground node crawler.js

# add cookie with sign-in session
docker run --tty -e MOD=debug -e URL="https://www.google.com/robots.txt" -e Cookie="foo=1234; bar=abcd" zhuyingda/webster-playground node crawler.js

# set user-agent
docker run --tty -e URL="https://www.google.com/robots.txt" -e Cookie="foo=1234; bar=abcd" -e UA="Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" zhuyingda/webster-playground node crawler.js

# see crawling log
docker run --tty -e MOD=debug -e URL="https://www.google.com/robots.txt" -e Cookie="foo=1234; bar=abcd" -e UA="Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" zhuyingda/webster-playground node crawler.js

Requirements

• Node.js 10.x+
• Works on Linux, Mac OSX

Or you can deploy on Docker.

Install

npm install webster

Single spider example

const { spider } = require('webster');

class MySpider extends spider {
    get defUserAgent() {
        return 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.71 Safari/537.36';
    }
    get defDeviceType() {
        return 'pc';
    }
    async parseHtml(html) {
        return true;
    }
}

(async () => {
    const spider = new MySpider({
        actions: [
            {
                type: 'waitForSelector',
                selector: 'div.js-details-container',
            }
        ],
        targets: [
            {
                selector: 'div.Box-row[role=row]',
                type: 'text',
                field: 'sugs'
            }
        ],
    });
    const url = `https://github.com/zhuyingda/webster`;
    let crawlResult = await spider.startRequest(url);
    console.log(crawlResult);
})();

Docker cluster example

Pull the example docker image:

docker pull zhuyingda/webster-demo
docker run -it zhuyingda/webster-demo

In this docker image, there is a simple cluster-able example:

// producer
const Webster = require('webster');
const Producer = Webster.producer;
const Task = Webster.task;

let task = new Task({
    spiderType: 'browser',
    engineType: 'playwright',
    browserType: 'chromium',
    url: 'http://quotes.toscrape.com/tag/humor/',
    targets: [
        {
            selector: 'span.text',
            type: 'text',
            field: 'quote'
        },
        {
            selector: 'li.next > a',
            type: 'attr',
            attrName: 'href',
            field: 'link'
        }
    ],
    actions: [
        {
            type: 'waitAfterPageLoading',
            value: 500
        }
    ],
    referInfo: {
        para1: 'this is a refer field 1',
        para2: 'this is a refer field 2'
    }
});

let myProducer = new Producer({
    channel: 'demo_channel1',
    dbConf: {
        redis: {
            host: 'redis-12419.c44.us-east-1-2.ec2.cloud.redislabs.com',
            port: 12419,
            password: 'X2AcjziaOOYPppWFOPiP4rmzZ9RFLViv'
        }
    }
});
myProducer.generateTask(task).then(() => {
    console.log('done');
    process.exit();
});

// consumer
const Webster = require('webster');
const Consumer = Webster.consumer;

class MyConsumer extends Consumer {
    constructor(option) {
        super(option);
    }
    afterCrawlRequest(result) {
        console.log('your scrape result:', result);
    }
}

let myConsumer = new MyConsumer({
    channel: 'demo_channel1',
    sleepTime: 5000,
    deviceType: 'pc',
    dbConf: {
        redis: {
            host: 'redis-12419.c44.us-east-1-2.ec2.cloud.redislabs.com',
            port: 12419,
            password: 'X2AcjziaOOYPppWFOPiP4rmzZ9RFLViv'
        }
    }
});
myConsumer.startConsume();

node demo_producer.js
env MOD=debug node demo_consumer.js

You can organize your crawler cluster by Consumer and Producer like this:

Usage on Raspbian Platform

sudo apt install chromium-browser chromium-codecs-ffmpeg
env MOD=debug EXE_PATH=/usr/bin/chromium-browser node demo_consumer.js

Documentation

You can see more details from here.

Code Contributors

This project exists thanks to all the people who contribute. [Contribute].

Financial Contributors

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Individuals

Organizations

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License

GPL-V3

Copyright © 2017-present, Yingda (Sugar) Zhu