Spidey - Robust Web Scraping Tool

Spidey is a powerful and reliable web scraping tool that allows users to crawl any website with multiple concurrency. With Spidey, you can easily extract data from websites and store it in a structured format using custom pipelines. The tool is designed to be highly scalable and can handle large amounts of data.

Features

• Easy to use API
• Supports multiple concurrency
• Highly scalable
• Data parsing using XPath and CSS Selectors
• Auto retries and error status code handling
• Built-in data pipeline and storage format
• Supports proxies
• Support custom data pipelines
• Support requests prioritization

Installation

You can install Spidey using NPM:

npm install spidey

Usage

Using Spidey is easy. Simply require the package and create a new instance of the Spidey class:

const { Spidey } = require('spidey');

const spidey = new Spidey({
  concurrency: 5,
  outputFormat: 'json',
  outputFileName: 'output.json'
  // other options...
});

spidey.request({
  url: 'https://example.com',
  // spidey options...
}, (response) => {
  const title = response.xpath('//*[@title="Google"]')[0].data;
  const heading = response.$('.heading').text();
  spidey.save({ title, heading });  
});

spider.start();

Spidey can also be used by extending as Class

class AmazonSpidey extends Spidey {
  constructor() {
    super({
      concurrency: 10,
      retries: 5,
      // spidey options...
    });
  }

  headers = {
    'user-agent':
      'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36',
  };

  startUrls = [
    'https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Amazon-Liquid-Soap-Refill-Fragrance/dp/B0996J4VV2',
    'https://www.amazon.de/Dancing-Interactive-Educational-Children-Recording/dp/B0BLVKYXXQ',
  ];

  parse(response: SpideyResponse) {
    const url = response.url;
    const title = response.xpath('//*[@id="productTitle"]/text()')[0].data.trim();
    this.save({ url, title });
  }
}

new MySpidey().start();

Request Options

When making a request using Spidey, you can pass multiple options to customize your request.

this.request(
  { 
    url, 
    headers: this.headers, 
    // request options...
  }, 
  this.parse.bind(this)
);

Name	Type	Required	Default	Description
url	string	Yes	-	Input URL for the request
method	string	No	GET	Request method
headers	any	No	null	Request headers
body	any	No	null	Request body
json	boolean	No	false	If true, the response will be converted into JSON
timeout	number	No	0	Request timeout in milliseconds. A value of 0 means no timeout
meta	any	No	{}	A meta object that can be used to pass metadata from the request to the response function
inline	boolean	No	false	If true, the response will be returned directly instead of being passed to a callback function
proxy	SpdieyProxy	No	null	Proxy configuration
proxyUrl	string	No	null	Proxy configuration as a URL
priority	number	No	null	Request priority. A number between 0-9, where 0 is highest priority and 9 is lowest priority. If not specified, no priority is assigned.

Spidey Options

You can pass Spidey options to a Spidey instance

const spidey = new Spidey({
  // spidey options...
});

OR

class MySpidey extends Spidey {
  constructor() {
    super({
      // spidey options...
    });
  }
}

Configuration	Type	Description	Default Value
concurrency	number	The number of concurrent requests.	10
delay	number	The delay between each request.	0
retries	number	The number of retries for each failed request.	0
retryStatusCode	number[]	Spidey will retry if it encounters these status codes.	[500, 502, 503, 504, 522, 524, 408, 429]
itemConcurrency	number	The number of concurrent crawled item processing.	Same as request concurrency
outputFormat	string	The output format such as json, csv, tsv.	null
outputFileName	string	The output format name.	data
logLevel	string	The output log level.	debug
proxy	object	The proxy configuration.	null
proxyUrl	string	The proxy URL configuration.	null
continuous	boolean	For long-running Spidey processes such as listening to new URLs from Redis or Kafka.	false
pipelines	SpideyPipeline[]	Item pipeline injection.	[]

Data Pipeline

Spidey enables the creation of personalized data pipelines for storing, validating, and manipulating the data that has been crawled.

Data Manipulation

export class ASINPipeline implements SpideyPipeline {
  constructor(private options?: SpideyOptions) {}

  process(data: Data) {
    data.url = data.url.split('/ref').shift() as string;
    data.asin = data.url.split('/').pop() as string;
    return data;
  }
}

Store Data to Mongodb

export class MongoPipeline implements SpideyPipeline {
  client: MongoClient;
  collection!: Collection;

  constructor(private options?: SpideyOptions) {
    this.client = new MongoClient(this.options?.mongoUrl);
  }

  async start() {
    await this.client.connect();
    const db = this.client.db(this.options?.mongoDb);
    this.collection = db.collection(this.options?.mongoCollection);
  }

  async complete() {
    await this.client.close();
  }

  async process(data: Data) {
    await this.collection.findOneAndUpdate({ asin: data.asin }, { $set: data }, { upsert: true });

    // Always return data back in pipelines in process function
    return data;
  }
}

Pipeline Usage

Pipelines can be injected to any spidey instance by passing in pipelines options.

class AmazonSpidey extends Spidey {
  constructor() {
    super({
      // ...spidey options
      pipelines: [ASINPipeline, MongoPipeline]
    });
  }
}

License

Spidey is licensed under the MIT License.