Memorious
About
Memorious is a light-weight web scraping toolkit. It supports scrapers that collect structured or un-structured data.
- Make crawlers modular and simple tasks reusable
- Provide utility functions to do common tasks such as data storage, HTTP session management
- Integrate crawlers with the Aleph and FollowTheMoney ecosystem
- 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 reused across different crawlers.
The basic steps of writing a Memorious crawler:
- Make YAML crawler configuration file
- Add different stages
- Write code for stage operations (optional)
- Test, rinse, repeat