Web Crawlers and Scrapers
| Rank | App | Description | Tags | Stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox
|
🗃 Open source self-hosted web archiving. Takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, and more... | self-hosted archivebox backups bookmark-archiver browser-bookmarks chromium digipres firefox headless-browser internet-archiving pinboard pocket python rss singlefile warc wayback-machine web-archiving wget youtube-dl | 19871 |
| 2 |
dgtlmoon/changedetection.io
|
The best and simplest free open source web page change detection, website watcher, restock monitor and notification service. Restock Monitor, change detection. Designed for simplicity - Simply monitor which websites had a text change for free. Free Open source web page change detection, Website defacement monitoring, Price change notification | self-hosted monitoring back-in-stock change-alert change-detection change-monitoring changedetection notifications restock-monitor url-monitor web-scraping website-change-detection website-change-detector website-change-monitor website-change-notification website-change-tracker website-defacement-monitoring website-monitor website-monitoring website-watcher | 14377 |
Web Crawlers and Scrapers: Automating Data Extraction from Websites
Web crawlers and web scrapers are software tools used to automatically extract data from websites. They allow you to automate tasks that would otherwise require manual effort, saving time and resources. These tools fall under the category of open source self-hosted apps.
Web Crawlers
Web crawlers, also known as spiders or robots, are automated scripts designed to traverse websites and collect data. They follow hyperlinks from one webpage to another and download the content of each page they visit. This information is typically stored in a local database or file for further processing. Web crawlers can be used for various purposes, such as:
- Indexing websites for search engines
- Monitoring price changes on e-commerce sites
- Collecting data for market research and analysis
- Archiving web content for historical purposes
Web Scrapers
Web scrapers are more advanced than web crawlers. While web crawlers can only extract data that is easily accessible through standard HTML, web scrapers use advanced techniques to parse and extract information from complex JavaScript-driven websites. They can also handle login sessions and forms, making them invaluable for extracting data from membership sites or other restricted access areas.
Web scrapers are often used to collect and process large amounts of structured data, such as product listings, prices, reviews, or social media content. This data can be processed further using data analysis tools, visualization software, or integrated into your own applications.
Open Source Self-Hosted Apps
Many web crawling and scraping solutions are available as open source self-hosted apps, which means that you can install them on your own server and customize them to suit your specific needs. Some popular open source tools include:
- Scrapy: A powerful and flexible Python framework for extracting data from websites using customizable spiders.
- Selenium: An extensive testing framework for automating web browsers, which can also be used for scraping websites with complex JavaScript content.
- Cheerio: A fast, flexible, and lean implementation of a pure jQuery library for parsing and manipulating HTML/XML data in Node.js.
- Beautiful Soup: A Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files, especially when the structure of the file is not known beforehand.
These tools offer a wide range of features and capabilities, allowing you to automate complex data extraction tasks with ease. By using open source solutions, you can save costs and have greater control over your data processing workflows.