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Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Python to build reliable crawlers. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with BeautifulSoup, Playwright, and raw HTTP. Both headful and headless mode. With proxy rotation.
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apify/crawlee-python
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Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end-to-end andhelps you build reliable scrapers. Fast.
🚀 Crawlee for Python is open to early adopters!
Your crawlers will appear almost human-like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data and persistently store it in machine-readable formats, without having to worry about the technical details. And thanks to rich configuration options, you can tweak almost any aspect of Crawlee to suit your project's needs if the default settings don't cut it.
👉View full documentation, guides and examples on theCrawlee project website 👈
We also have a TypeScript implementation of the Crawlee, which you can explore and utilize for your projects. Visit our GitHub repository for more informationCrawlee for JS/TS on GitHub.
We recommend visiting theIntroduction tutorial in Crawlee documentation for more information.
Crawlee is available ascrawlee
package on PyPI. This package includes the core functionality, while additional features are available as optional extras to keep dependencies and package size minimal.
To install Crawlee with all features, run the following command:
python -m pip install'crawlee[all]'
Then, install thePlaywright dependencies:
playwright install
Verify that Crawlee is successfully installed:
python -c'import crawlee; print(crawlee.__version__)'
For detailed installation instructions see theSetting up documentation page.
The quickest way to get started with Crawlee is by using the Crawlee CLI and selecting one of the prepared templates. First, ensure you havePipx installed:
pipx --help
Then, run the CLI and choose from the available templates:
pipx run'crawlee[cli]' create my-crawler
If you already havecrawlee
installed, you can spin it up by running:
crawlee create my-crawler
Here are some practical examples to help you get started with different types of crawlers in Crawlee. Each example demonstrates how to set up and run a crawler for specific use cases, whether you need to handle simple HTML pages or interact with JavaScript-heavy sites. A crawler run will create astorage/
directory in your current working directory.
TheBeautifulSoupCrawler
downloads web pages using an HTTP library and provides HTML-parsed content to the user. By default it usesHttpxHttpClient
for HTTP communication andBeautifulSoup for parsing HTML. It is ideal for projects that require efficient extraction of data from HTML content. This crawler has very good performance since it does not use a browser. However, if you need to execute client-side JavaScript, to get your content, this is not going to be enough and you will need to usePlaywrightCrawler
. Also if you want to use this crawler, make sure you installcrawlee
withbeautifulsoup
extra.
importasynciofromcrawlee.crawlersimportBeautifulSoupCrawler,BeautifulSoupCrawlingContextasyncdefmain()->None:crawler=BeautifulSoupCrawler(# Limit the crawl to max requests. Remove or increase it for crawling all links.max_requests_per_crawl=10, )# Define the default request handler, which will be called for every request.@crawler.router.default_handlerasyncdefrequest_handler(context:BeautifulSoupCrawlingContext)->None:context.log.info(f'Processing{context.request.url} ...')# Extract data from the page.data= {'url':context.request.url,'title':context.soup.title.stringifcontext.soup.titleelseNone, }# Push the extracted data to the default dataset.awaitcontext.push_data(data)# Enqueue all links found on the page.awaitcontext.enqueue_links()# Run the crawler with the initial list of URLs.awaitcrawler.run(['https://crawlee.dev'])if__name__=='__main__':asyncio.run(main())
ThePlaywrightCrawler
uses a headless browser to download web pages and provides an API for data extraction. It is built onPlaywright, an automation library designed for managing headless browsers. It excels at retrieving web pages that rely on client-side JavaScript for content generation, or tasks requiring interaction with JavaScript-driven content. For scenarios where JavaScript execution is unnecessary or higher performance is required, consider using theBeautifulSoupCrawler
. Also if you want to use this crawler, make sure you installcrawlee
withplaywright
extra.
importasynciofromcrawlee.crawlersimportPlaywrightCrawler,PlaywrightCrawlingContextasyncdefmain()->None:crawler=PlaywrightCrawler(# Limit the crawl to max requests. Remove or increase it for crawling all links.max_requests_per_crawl=10, )# Define the default request handler, which will be called for every request.@crawler.router.default_handlerasyncdefrequest_handler(context:PlaywrightCrawlingContext)->None:context.log.info(f'Processing{context.request.url} ...')# Extract data from the page.data= {'url':context.request.url,'title':awaitcontext.page.title(), }# Push the extracted data to the default dataset.awaitcontext.push_data(data)# Enqueue all links found on the page.awaitcontext.enqueue_links()# Run the crawler with the initial list of requests.awaitcrawler.run(['https://crawlee.dev'])if__name__=='__main__':asyncio.run(main())
Explore ourExamples page in the Crawlee documentation for a wide range of additional use cases and demonstrations.
Why Crawlee is the preferred choice for web scraping and crawling?
- Unified interface forHTTP & headless browser crawling.
- Automaticparallel crawling based on available system resources.
- Written in Python withtype hints - enhances DX (IDE autocompletion) and reduces bugs (static type checking).
- Automaticretries on errors or when you’re getting blocked.
- Integratedproxy rotation and session management.
- Configurablerequest routing - direct URLs to the appropriate handlers.
- Persistentqueue for URLs to crawl.
- Pluggablestorage of both tabular data and files.
- Robusterror handling.
- Asyncio-based – Leveraging the standardAsyncio library, Crawlee delivers better performance and seamless compatibility with other modern asynchronous libraries.
- Type hints – Newer project built with modern Python, and complete type hint coverage for a better developer experience.
- Simple integration – Crawlee crawlers are regular Python scripts, requiring no additional launcher executor. This flexibility allows to integrate a crawler directly into other applications.
- State persistence – Supports state persistence during interruptions, saving time and costs by avoiding the need to restart scraping pipelines from scratch after an issue.
- Organized data storages – Allows saving of multiple types of results in a single scraping run. Offers several storing options (seedatasets &key-value stores).
Crawlee is open-source and runs anywhere, but since it's developed byApify, it's easy to set up on the Apify platform and run in the cloud. Visit theApify SDK website to learn more about deploying Crawlee to the Apify platform.
If you find any bug or issue with Crawlee, pleasesubmit an issue on GitHub. For questions, you can ask onStack Overflow, in GitHub Discussions or you can join ourDiscord server.
Your code contributions are welcome, and you'll be praised for eternity! If you have any ideas for improvements, either submit an issue or create a pull request. For contribution guidelines and the code of conduct, seeCONTRIBUTING.md.
This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 - see theLICENSE file for details.
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Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Python to build reliable crawlers. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with BeautifulSoup, Playwright, and raw HTTP. Both headful and headless mode. With proxy rotation.
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