| id | crawlee |
|---|---|
| title | Building crawlers with Crawlee |
| description | Build Apify Actors using Crawlee's BeautifulSoupCrawler, ParselCrawler, or PlaywrightCrawler. |
import RunnableCodeBlock from '@site/src/components/RunnableCodeBlock';
import CrawleeBeautifulSoupExample from '!!raw-loader!roa-loader!./code/05_crawlee_beautifulsoup.py'; import CrawleeParselExample from '!!raw-loader!roa-loader!./code/05_crawlee_parsel.py'; import CrawleePlaywrightExample from '!!raw-loader!roa-loader!./code/05_crawlee_playwright.py';
In this guide, you'll learn how to build web crawlers with the Crawlee library in your Apify Actors.
Crawlee is a Python library for web scraping and browser automation that provides a robust and flexible framework for building web scraping tasks. It seamlessly integrates with the Apify platform and supports a variety of scraping techniques, from static HTML parsing to dynamic JavaScript-rendered content handling. Crawlee offers a range of crawlers, including HTTP-based crawlers like HttpCrawler, BeautifulSoupCrawler and ParselCrawler, and browser-based crawlers like PlaywrightCrawler, to suit different scraping needs.
In this guide, you'll learn how to use Crawlee with BeautifulSoupCrawler, ParselCrawler, and PlaywrightCrawler to build Apify Actors for web scraping.
The BeautifulSoupCrawler is ideal for extracting data from static HTML pages. It uses BeautifulSoup for parsing and ImpitHttpClient for HTTP communication, ensuring efficient and lightweight scraping. If you do not need to execute JavaScript on the page, BeautifulSoupCrawler is a great choice for your scraping tasks. The following example shows how to use it in an Apify Actor.
The ParselCrawler works in the same way as BeautifulSoupCrawler, but it uses the Parsel library for HTML parsing. This allows for more powerful and flexible data extraction using XPath selectors. It should be faster than BeautifulSoupCrawler. The following example shows how to use ParselCrawler in an Apify Actor.
The PlaywrightCrawler is built for handling dynamic web pages that rely on JavaScript for content rendering. Using the Playwright library, it provides a browser-based automation environment to interact with complex websites. The following example shows how to use PlaywrightCrawler in an Apify Actor.
All three crawlers above route their requests through Apify Proxy, which rotates IP addresses to avoid rate limiting and blocking. Actor.create_proxy_configuration returns a Crawlee-compatible proxy configuration, which is passed to the crawler as proxy_configuration. Crawlee then rotates the proxy IP for every request on its own. Because the configuration is only available inside the running Actor, the crawler is created in main and the request handler is registered on a standalone Router up front. To select specific proxy groups or a country, pass the relevant arguments to Actor.create_proxy_configuration. For details, see Proxy management.
In this guide, you learned how to use the Crawlee library in your Apify Actors. By using the BeautifulSoupCrawler, ParselCrawler, and PlaywrightCrawler crawlers, you can efficiently scrape static or dynamic web pages, making it easy to build web scraping tasks in Python. See the Actor templates to get started with your own scraping tasks. If you have questions or need assistance, feel free to reach out on our GitHub or join our Discord community. Happy scraping!