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Web-Scraping with Scrapy: Spiders and Utilities

This repository contains working code for web-scraping with scrapy and MongoDB (see below), it contains code for URL scraping, introductions to BeautifulSoup, and other assorted legacy and utility scripts. The scrapy code comes from the command-line scrapy repo and was frozen on January 18th, 2022. That repo now contains more up-to-date, but less flexible code for distributed web-crawling with scrapy. For a universal crawling web-portal, please check out the scrapy server repo.

Introduction

Our goal is a scalable, robust web-crawling pipeline (in Python) applicable across web designs and accessible for researchers with minimal computational skills. Our method involves using Scrapy spiders to recursively gather website links (to a given depth), collect and parse items (text, images, PDFs, and .docs) using BeautifulSoup and textract, and saving them locally and/or to MongoDB.

The most recent web scraper is scrapy/schools/schools/spiders/scrapy_vanilla.py. See usage notes below.

Expect our spider and setup to continue being improved on, with better documentation and maybe even a web portal/user interface in the future. But if you're just trying to scrape website text, this should prove resilient as is.

Usage notes

scrapy_vanilla.py uses scrapy's LinkExtractor to crawl recursively--meaning that it will crawl not just the a given input URL, but also those links it finds that start with that. For instance, if you feed it site.com, it will scrape site.com/page-- but not 'yelp.com' or other places outside the given root.

URLs to scrape are loaded from scrapy/schools/schools/spiders/test_urls.csv. The simplest way to feed the spider new URLs is by updating this file. To test scalability, feel free to use the full list of 6K+ charter school URLs (gathered in 2018) in scrapy/charter_schools_urls_2018.csv.

You'll get best results if you deploy the spider from within a scrapy project, like in our scrapy/schools/ folder, because we've fine-tuned the items.py, middlewares.py, settings.py, and pipelines.py configurations (all under scrapy/schools/schools/)--and scrapy_vanilla.py draws on these.

Running the web scraper

Method 1: install and run locally

Install dependencies

Navigate to the /web_scraping/scrapy/schools directory. Then run the following commands:

# Create and start a virtual environment for Python dependencies.
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
# Install dependencies.
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Optional: Store crawling output to MongoDB

If not yet installed, install MongoDB.

Ensure that this key-value pair of ITEM_PIPELINES in /web_scraping/scrapy/schools/schools/settings.py is NOT commented out:

'schools.pipelines.MongoDBPipeline': 300

If you DON'T want to use the MongoDB pipeline (e.g., you only want to store results locally), remove this element.

Also make sure that in /web_scraping/scrapy/schools/schools/settings.py:

# This next line must NOT be commented.
MONGO_URI = 'mongodb://localhost:27017' 
# This next line is commented.
# MONGO_URI = 'mongodb://mongodb_container:27017'

# This line also must NOT be commented
MONGO_DATABASE = 'schoolSpider'

Start MongoDB. This step depends on the operating system. On Ubuntu 18.04, this is:

sudo systemctl -l start mongodb

With Docker, you can start it with:

docker pull mongo
docker run -p 27017:27017 --name mongodb mongo

To stop MongoDB running in Docker:

docker stop mongodb

Run instructions

Finally, navigate to /web_scraping/scrapy/schools/schools/ and run:

scrapy crawl schoolspider -a school_list=spiders/test_urls.csv -o schoolspider_output.json

This line means to run the schoolspider crawler with the given csv or tsv input file and append the output to a json file. Note that subsequent runs of the crawler wsill append output, rather than replace. Appending to a json file is optional and the crawler can be run without doing this. Not specified in this command, is that data is saved behind the scenes to a MongoDB database named "schoolSpider" if the MongoDB pipeline is used.

Adding Logging

To add a log output file, you'll need to add '-L' and '--logfile' flags. The -L flag specifies the level of logging, such as 'INFO', 'DEBUG', or 'ERROR', and specifies what types of log messages appear in the log file. The --logfile flag specifies the output file location, such as './schoolspider_log_1_1_2021.log'

A sample command with a log file:

scrapy crawl schoolspider -a school_list=spiders/test_urls.csv -o schoolspider_output.json -L INFO --logfile ../logs/schoolspider_log_4_13_2021.log

When you're finished and you don't need to run the scraper anymore run:

# Deactivate the environment.
deactivate

Method 2: install and run in a container

Firstly, get Docker.

If you want to use MongoDB, ensure that in /web_scraping/scrapy/schools/schools/settings.py, that:

# This next line is commented.
# MONGO_URI = 'mongodb://localhost' 
# This next line must NOT be commented.
MONGO_URI = 'mongodb://mongodb_container:27017'

Also, ensure that you uncomment the line:
MONGO_DATABASE = 'schoolSpider'

And, that:

'schools.pipelines.MongoDBPipeline': 300

is one of the key-value pairs in of ITEM_PIPELINES in /web_scraping/scrapy/schools/schools/settings.py by uncommenting the line. If you don't want to use the pipeline, remove the element.

You will also need to set the "MONGO_USERNAME" and "MONGO_PASSWORD" properties in order to connect to MongoDB.

Finally, inside /web_scraping, run:

# build the containers and run in the background
docker-compose up --build -d 
# to shutdown when finished
docker-compose down

No output json file is created through this method. Rather, the primary method of storing data is through MongoDB (if it's enabled). Data inside MongoDB is persisted through a volume defined in docker-compose.yml.

The Mongo container can be easily accessed by "exec"ing into the container:

docker exec -it mongodb_container bash

Note: if running on a Windows machine, you will need to prefix that command with 'winpty'

From there, you can enter 'mongo' to start the Mongo CLI within the container, and it can be navigated the same as Mongo on your computer.

Method 3: Run with a Flask API wrapper

NOTE that this implementation may have broken the other methods. This is still to be tested.

This method requires a Redis server to handle tasks. You can install Redis with instructions here (Ubuntu 18.04): https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-secure-redis-on-ubuntu-18-04

You will need at least 2 screens/terminals for this, although there may be a way to run Redis and/or Flask headless to remove this need. "Screen R" will be your screen for Redis, and "Screen F" will refer to your screen for Flask.

  1. In either screen, start your Mongo database. This can be done easily with Docker:
docker pull mongo && docker run --name mongodb -e MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_USERNAME=admin -e MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_PASSWORD=someSecretPassword -p 27017:27017 mongo

  1. In both screens, start a virtual env and install your requirements (see Method 1)

  2. In Screen R, start your Redis worker

rq worker crawling-tasks
  1. In Screen F, start your Flask server from the scrapy/schools/schools/ directory (you can also run this from another directory, just swap "app.py" for the path to "app.py". This will run on Flask's default port 5000
python app.py
  1. Requests for crawling tasks can be sent to the Flask server with a POST command. Currently only .csv files are accepted, but .tsv files will be available soon.
curl -X POST -d 'file=@path/to/your/csv/file.csv' localhost:5000/job

  1. The returned object will have the status of the request (200 for ok, 400 for a bad input, such as a missing file), and the ID of the task being run. This ID can be queried from the Mongo database to check the status of the running task (TODO: status update when job is finished). These tasks are stored in the "task_list" database in Mongo.

  2. Gathered data can be found in 2 places. First, parsed text data and file/image urls are stored as objects in Mongo in the schoolSpider database. Second, raw files and images are stored locally, in "files/" and "images/" directories. TODO: modify the file and image pipelines so that they get stored to Mongo (which can handle raw files like that)

Simpler API instructions using docker-compose

  1. Make sure you have Docker and Docker-Compose installed

  2. Navigate to the directory with docker-compose.yml

  3. Run "docker-compose up --build" (optional flags: " --force-recreate --renew-anon-volumes" if you have old docker volumes -- this can cause "authentication errors" due to Mongo not updating your credentials for the db)

  4. Once it's running, run "curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data' -F 'file=@./scrapy/schools/schools/spiders/test_urls.csv' localhost:5000/job"

  5. From there, you can check the status (work in progress -- it says it's done when it's still running): "curl localhost:5000/task?task_id=" + the "job_id" from the last CURL command

  6. Or check Mongo: "docker exec -it mongodb_container bash" "mongo -u admin -p mdipass" "show dbs" "use schoolSpider" "db.otherItems.count()" "db.otherItems.find_one()" etc...