Category: Development

We recently composed a scraper that works to extract data of a static site. By a static site, we mean such a site that does not utilize JS scripting that loads or transforms on-site data.

Technologies stack

1. Node.js, the server-side JS environment. The main characteristic of Node.js is the code asynchronous execution.
2. Apify SDK, the scalable web scraping and crawling library for JavaScript/Node.js. Let’s highlight its excellent characteristics:

• automatically scales a pool of headless Chrome/Puppeteer instances
• maintains queues of URLs to crawl (handled, pending) – this makes it possible to accommodate crawler possible failures and resumes.
• saves crawl results to a convenient [json] dataset (local or in the cloud)
• allows proxies rotation
  
  We’ll use a Cheerio crawler of Apify to crawl and extract data off the target site. The target is https://www.ebinger-gmbh.com/.

When working with Apify crawlers, it’s necessary to init RequestQueue. How to fill in RequestQueue from txt file?

Given

A text file with urls to crawl. In our case it’s categories.txt. We’ll use LineReader node package to open and iterate the file line by line.
LineReader to install:

npm i --save line-reader  

Since requestQueue methods return Promise, when iterating over the lines of the file we need to apply async function for each line to be added as url into the requestQueue.

The code

const queue_name ='ebinger';
const base_url = 'https://www.ebinger.com/';

Apify.main(async () => {
 
	const requestQueue = await Apify.openRequestQueue(queue_name);
	const lineReader = require('line-reader');
	lineReader.eachLine('categories.txt', async function(line) {
		//console.log('adding ', line);
		let url = base_url + line.trim(); 
		await requestQueue.addRequest({ url: url });
	}); 
	var { totalRequestCount, handledRequestCount, pendingRequestCount, name } = await requestQueue.getInfo();
	console.log(`RequestQueue "${name}" with requests:` );
	console.log(' handledRequestCount:', handledRequestCount);
	console.log(' pendingRequestCount:', pendingRequestCount);
	console.log(' totalRequestCount:'  , totalRequestCount);
...