Memorious

memorious is a distributed web scraping toolkit. It is a light-weight tool that schedules, monitors and supports scrapers that collect structured or un-structured data. This includes the following use cases:

• Maintain an overview of a fleet of crawlers
• Schedule crawler execution in regular intervals
• Store execution information and error messages
• Distribute scraping tasks across multiple machines
• Make crawlers modular and simple tasks re-usable
• Get out of your way as much as possible

Design

When writing a scraper, you often need to paginate through through an index page, then download an HTML page for each result and finally parse that page and insert or update a record in a database.

memorious handles this by managing a set of crawlers, each of which can be composed of multiple stages. Each stage is implemented using a Python function, which can be re-used across different crawlers.

The basic steps of writing a Memorious crawler:

1. Make YAML crawler configuration file
2. Add different stages
3. Write code for stage operations (optional)
4. Test, rinse, repeat

Documentation

The documentation for Memorious is available at memorious.readthedocs.io. Feel free to edit the source files in the docs folder and send pull requests for improvements.

To build the documentation, inside the docs folder run make html

You'll find the resulting HTML files in /docs/_build/html.