Writing posts is hards, especially using foreign language. So at first i’ll provide brief and than will try to explain in more details using bad English (my appologies).

What is Grab?

How many mature python web scraping frameworks do you know? I bet the first thing come in mind would be - Scrapy. Well no more. There is another one framework which used in production for different kind of projects for years. This framework used to scrape nearly all noticeable big websites in internet: Google Play, App Store, Booking, Agoda, TripAdvisor, Yelp, AngelList etc. and hundreds if not thousands of e-commerce stores.

It was covertly developed by the Siberian guy Lorien, mainly used by small organized group and was never introduced to the worldwide community, primarily because of lack of documentation. Fortunately author finished English docs this year and i guess the time is come.

The Grab framework developed from strictly practical purposes therefore it sugnifficially different from Scrapy. Noticeable features would be:

Python 3 ready

Less dependencies

HTTP and SOCKS proxies support

International Domain Name support

Flexible customization of HTTP requests

Powerful API of extracting info from HTML documents with XPATH queries

Asynchronous API to make thousands of simultaneous queries. This part of library called Spider .

. Automatical change of User Agent

Rotating proxies implementation out of the box

Clear mechanism of requests flow

Multiprocessing support

Few build-in HTTPCache/Queue backends (MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis)

Grab learning curve is not even half as hard as with Scrapy. It’s pretty simple but powerful framework, even if Grab not so popular, the numbers of commits are not too much different 2000+ for Scrapy and 1500+ for Grab. And by the way Grab tests coverage is better.

TLDR; Grab Framework could be reasonable alternative to Scrapy especially for people who’re relying on Python 3. More easy to learn, less dependencies, with few backends for http cache/tasks queue and proxies support out-of-the-box.

What is Grab and what is Grab:Spider?

Grab is a http requests lib similar to requests . In general it’s a wrapper around the pycurl library to make your life easy. PyCurl is low level and does not do too much, you have to take care of many things by yourself.

It could be used for web scraping task, but it would inefficient. For better performance you’ll need to do scraping in a few threads. It’s pretty hard to use threads for any complex web scraping task, where as usual you have to route requests in a right order and share some state between threads.

Grab

You can think about the grab as about headless browser without javascript enabled.

from grab import Grab g = Grab() g . go( 'https://github.com/login' ) g . set_input( 'login' , '***' ) g . set_input( 'password' , '***' ) g . submit() g . doc . save( '/tmp/x.html' ) g . doc( '//span[contains(@class, "octicon-sign-out")]' ) . assert_exists() home_url = g . doc( '//a[contains(@class, "header-nav-link name")]/@href' ) . text() repo_url = home_url + '?tab=repositories' g . go(repo_url) for elem in g . doc . select( '//h3[@class="repo-list-name"]/a' ): print ( ' %s : %s ' % (elem . text(), g . make_url_absolute(elem . attr( 'href' ))))

Grab:Spider

The most interesting part of library and the reason why it’s called a “Framework” is Spider - implementation of asynchronous scraping.

Basically Grab:Spider is a framework which process network requests asynchronously using multicurl library. Each request processed by defined handler which could spawn new request which will be processed by other handlers.

from grab.spider import Spider, Task class ExampleSpider (Spider): def task_generator (self): for lang in ( 'python' , 'ruby' , 'perl' ): url = 'https://www.google.com/search?q={}' . format(lang) yield Task( 'search' , url = url, lang = lang) def task_search (self, grab, task): print ( '{}: {}' . format( task . lang, grab . doc( '//div[@class="s"]//cite' ) . text() )) bot = ExampleSpider() bot . run()

If you used Scrapy Framework before, you could notice the difference between grab handlers and Scrapy callbacks. Scrapy callbacks accept Response object as a parameter. While in grab:spider you got your “headless browser” Grab instance and Task object which contains parameters used by Grab:Spider to send network request. Also pay attention that in grab handlers should start with task_ prefix.

Ok i’m interested, how to start?

I believe the best way to start would be to take practical task, implement it and to demonstrate how framework could help you to resolve problems.

I prepared simple web scraping project to demonstrate how framework could help you to scrape data more effectively. This scraper build to collect information from the list of data science blogs posted here https://github.com/rushter/data-science-blogs and store collected data into the mongodb.

This is what you need to follow example:

mongodb (only for this example, it’s not required for grab)

python 2.7 (tested on 2.7)

Clone repository

git clonehttps://github.com/istinspring/grab-datascience-blogs

create and activate virtual environment for this project, cd into the project directory and install required dependencies pip install -r requirements.txt . Next you need to copy blog list *.opml file into the project’s var/ .

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rushter/data-science-blogs/master/data-science.opml -P var/

And finally run it with python cli.py -S var/data-science.opml command.

Digging into the code.

Let’s follow the code, i’ll try explain it in details. It’s just a simplified version of template i used as initial point for web scraping projects. Of course it’s possible to remove unnecessary parts and cut the code into just one file, but the goal is to demonstrate you how actual web scraping projects usually developed.

There is few parts, first cli.py a command line interface used to perform various set of tasks, in this case it have 2 options - run scraper and run few mongodb queries over collected data.

Usually you will have more than one spider, so it would be useful to move common parts into the base class and inherit your scrapers from or as option use mixins. So there is scrapers/base.py with BaseSpider where methods to save data and setup Spider object are defined.

Initialization code for your scrapers could be complex and probably better to move this code into the separated module/class, usually i have it in utils/ . In this project initialization code located just inside the scraper as get_instance classmethod.

Spider object accept different parameters described in documentation source code in details, for this task i store this params in settings.py file. Grab implemented in a way to do things “by default”, for example if Grab:Spider can’t receive response for some reasons, it will not skip it silently like Scrapy do “by default”, Grab will try to perform request again. It’s not cool when your framework missed whole category, just because target server failed to send response.

SPIDER_CONFIG = { 'thread_number' : 10 , 'network_try_limit' : 3 , 'task_try_limit' : 3 , 'max_task_generator_chunk' : 5 , 'priority_mode' : 'const' , }

As you can see in get_instance it’s possible to define list of proxies, and backends for http cache and tasks queue. After you done with initialization run the spider:

spider = DataScienceBlogsSpider . get_instance( data_science_blogs_list = args . scrape_blogs) spider . run()

When we run scraper it will activate handler called task_generator this method used to spawn initial tasks for further processing. There is another way - you could defince class attribute called initial_urls and Grab will generate tasks for you and pass results into the task_initial handler.

def task_generator (self): blogs = self . parse_blogs_list() for blog in blogs: yield Task( 'html' , url = blog[ 'html' ], blog = blog)

Here we generate tasks to the blog pages. Notice that grab handlers are python generators, the tasks will not performed “immediately”, but scheduled by Garb:Spider (according to the task priority).

Sometimes websites are trying to filter request using various methods: filtering by user-agent or ip address. With Grab you can easily bypass it. First of all there is out-the-box feature to work with list of proxies. Grab:Spider by default will rotate them for each request. Same for User Agents. But at the same time it’s possible to define the chains of requests which will utilize same proxy.

Remember i compared grab object with headless browser? It’s basically incapsulates both Request and Response.

Each spider is a set of response handlers. Response handler receives grab object that was used to make network requests and that contains data about response. Via grab object you have access to low-level details like: headers, cookies, payload and to high-level API for filling web forms, searching for text, querying the DOM.

So in handler you can clone grab object i.e. open new tab in the same browser with same cookies and headers to spawn new request with slightly adjusted parameters usually it’s required if you “logged in” in previous request and want to keep your session for the next request.

def task_page (self, grab, task): # ...process the page... g = grab . clone() g . setup(url = task . blog[ 'rss' ]) yield Task( 'rss' , grab = g, blog = task . blog)

Much more clear than Scrapy magic with meta parameter right? You even could define post request, it’s pretty useful if you want to grab some additional data using from website urls usually called by AJAX requests. For instance - google play “permissions” for the application.

As you can see each handler starts with ‘task_’ and accept 2 parameters:

grab - Grab object

- Grab object task - Task object

Task is used if data you want to scrape located on few pages and you’ll need to pass previously collected data to the new handler.

Also task accept parameters to setup task priority, control cache per request (refresh/disable - useful for POST requests), counters for retries.

http://docs.grablib.org/en/latest/spider/task.html

Where are middlewares?

Grab has no such thing as Scrapy’s middlewares. Scrapy tried to use similar conceptions as traditional web frameworks, but from practical purposes it’s not necessary. As usual you need to highjack some parameters of the grab object before the request or check some conditions, and this could be easily implemented using ordinal python decorators.

from grab.spider import Spider from grab.decorators import integrity class SomeSpider (Spider): """ Decorator code https://github.com/lorien/grab/blob/master/grab/spider/decorators.py """ def check_integrity (self, grab): exists = grab . doc( '//div[@id="footer"]/a[text()="About Us"]' ) . exists() if not exists: raise DataNotValid @integrity ( 'check_integrity' ) def task_page (self, grab, task): pass

I made a simple “page validation” decorator

Http cache and queue backends

It would be good idea to save scraped pages into the local http cache, to avoid network i/o during development process, and there is few backends available for mongodb, mysql and postgres. In most cases i use mongodb.

Another noticable feature - backends for task queues. Sometimes your scraper handler could generate large amount of requests and consume a lot of memory which could be a problem if memory is limited (small or micro instances).

In this case you could move your task queue from memory into the database. https://github.com/lorien/grab/tree/master/grab/spider/queue_backen

Queue backends for mongo and redis are available.

Queue backends used if your handlers produce too much tasks and they started to consume memory, it’s pertty common situation when you scraping e-commerce websites using low tier cloud instance. So you have an option to move your tasks into the mongodb or redis. Also it could be used to build distributed crawlers.

Additional dependencies

Grab relies on 2 additional libs. Few month ago author decided to move out some parts from grab library to keep the core simple:

weblib - Collection of tools for web-scraping

selectors - API to extract data from HTML and XML documents

weblib is a library with a bunch of commonly used functions and helpers. As far as i remember there is even scrapers for popular search engines!

While selectors provide nice syntax to lxml library so you sould use it like:

# extract text from html node in form of list # ['title1', 'title2'] items = grab . doc( '//h2[@class="item"]' ) . text_list() # extract one (first) text from node or return empty string # if node not found item = grab . doc( '//h2[@class="item"]' ) . text(default = '' ) # similar for attributes images = grab . doc( '//img[@class="item-image"]' ) . attr_list( 'src' ) # or just one, if there is no image exception will be rised image = grab . doc( '//img[@class="item-image"]' ) . attr( 'src' )

Analyze data

After your scraper will finish work you could try to extract some useful info from collected data. I’m not a noSQL bigot, but i believe it’s a right tools if you use them with caution and for right purposes. And it’s turned out that MongoDB is the best comfortable solution for web scraping. Primarily because it’s schema-less, and i use it all the times, even if it’s not main database for project, it’s really worth to use it like a middle storage for your raw data which could be processed, validated and stored into the Postgres (which of course better for e-commerce because of transactions, strict structure, guaranteed record etc.)

Count all blogs with authors:

db.blogs.find({ content.authors : {$exists : true , $not : {$size : 0 }} }).count();

Count blogs with python in articles tags:

db.blogs.find({ "content.tags" : {$exists : true , $in : [ "python" ]} }).count();

Get all blogs with scraping in tags:

db.blogs.find( { "content.tags" : {$exists : true , $in : [ /scraping/ ]} }, { source_url : true } );

Get all blogs on wordpress:

db.blogs.find({ "imports.css" : {$in : [ /wp-content/ ]} }, { source_url : true });

Get all blogs with twitter bootstrap:

db.blogs.find({ "imports.css" : {$in : [ /bootstrap/ ]} }).count();

List of popular tags:

db.blogs.aggregate( [ { $match : { "content.tags" : {$not : {$size : 0 }}} }, { $project : { "content.tags" : 1 } }, { $unwind : "$content.tags" }, { $group : { _id : "$content.tags" , count : {$sum : 1 } } }, { $sort : {count : - 1 } } ] );

Future plans

If my first experiment with tech blogging will be successful i’ll write few additional articles about practical web scraping and related technologies.

How to bootstrap REST service around your scrapers?

Effective way to remove duplicates using Bloom filtering

How to parse HUGE website like booking.com?

Grab with Celery

Effective way to build Data Driven Websites

For Grab framework itself, there is many things author working, one is - API interface to real time information from scrapers. It’s really cool since it would be possible to build some additional infrastructure - deploying system, Admin/Web interface. Also, author keep with Transport layer and probably new shinny transport based on AsyncIO will be implemented.