Pro Web Content Crawler (With Images)

Python Crawlee with BeautifulSoup template

A template for web scraping data from websites starting from provided URLs using Python. The starting URLs are passed through the Actor's input schema, defined by the input schema. The template uses Crawlee for Python for efficient web crawling, handling each request through a user-defined handler that uses Beautiful Soup to extract data from the page. Enqueued URLs are managed in the request queue, and the extracted data is saved in a dataset for easy access.

Included features

• Apify SDK - a toolkit for building Apify Actors in Python.
• Crawlee for Python - a web scraping and browser automation library.
• Input schema - define and validate a schema for your Actor's input.
• Request queue - manage the URLs you want to scrape in a queue.
• Dataset - store and access structured data extracted from web pages.
• Beautiful Soup - a library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files.

Resources

• Video introduction to Python SDK
• Webinar introducing to Crawlee for Python
• Apify Python SDK documentation
• Crawlee for Python documentation
• Python tutorials in Academy
• Integration with Make, GitHub, Zapier, Google Drive, and other apps
• Video guide on getting scraped data using Apify API
• A short guide on how to build web scrapers using code templates:

Getting started

For complete information see this article. In short, you will:

1. Build the Actor
2. Run the Actor

Pull the Actor for local development

If you would like to develop locally, you can pull the existing Actor from Apify console using Apify CLI:

1. Install apify-cli

   Using Homebrew

   brew install apify-cli
   

   Using NPM

   npm -g install apify-cli
   

2. Pull the Actor by its unique <ActorId>, which is one of the following:

   • unique name of the Actor to pull (e.g. "apify/hello-world")
   • or ID of the Actor to pull (e.g. "E2jjCZBezvAZnX8Rb")

   You can find both by clicking on the Actor title at the top of the page, which will open a modal containing both Actor unique name and Actor ID.

   This command will copy the Actor into the current directory on your local machine.

   apify pull <ActorId>
   

Documentation reference

To learn more about Apify and Actors, take a look at the following resources:

• Apify SDK for JavaScript documentation
• Apify SDK for Python documentation
• Apify Platform documentation
• Join our developer community on Discord