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CheerioCrawler

Provides a framework for the parallel crawling of web pages using plain HTTP requests and cheerio HTML parser. The URLs to crawl are fed either from a static list of URLs or from a dynamic queue of URLs enabling recursive crawling of websites.

Since CheerioCrawler uses raw HTTP requests to download web pages, it is very fast and efficient on data bandwidth. However, if the target website requires JavaScript to display the content, you might need to use PuppeteerCrawler or PlaywrightCrawler instead, because it loads the pages using full-featured headless Chrome browser.

CheerioCrawler downloads each URL using a plain HTTP request, parses the HTML content using Cheerio and then invokes the user-provided CheerioCrawlerOptions.requestHandler to extract page data using a jQuery-like interface to the parsed HTML DOM.

The source URLs are represented using Request objects that are fed from RequestList or RequestQueue instances provided by the CheerioCrawlerOptions.requestList or CheerioCrawlerOptions.requestQueue constructor options, respectively.

If both CheerioCrawlerOptions.requestList and CheerioCrawlerOptions.requestQueue are used, the instance first processes URLs from the RequestList and automatically enqueues all of them to RequestQueue before it starts their processing. This ensures that a single URL is not crawled multiple times.

The crawler finishes when there are no more Request objects to crawl.

We can use the preNavigationHooks to adjust gotOptions:

preNavigationHooks: [
    (crawlingContext, gotOptions) => {
        // ...
    },
]

By default, CheerioCrawler only processes web pages with the text/html and application/xhtml+xml MIME content types (as reported by the Content-Type HTTP header), and skips pages with other content types. If you want the crawler to process other content types, use the CheerioCrawlerOptions.additionalMimeTypes constructor option. Beware that the parsing behavior differs for HTML, XML, JSON and other types of content. For more details, see CheerioCrawlerOptions.requestHandler.

New requests are only dispatched when there is enough free CPU and memory available, using the functionality provided by the AutoscaledPool class. All AutoscaledPool configuration options can be passed to the autoscaledPoolOptions parameter of the CheerioCrawler constructor. For user convenience, the minConcurrency and maxConcurrency AutoscaledPool options are available directly in the CheerioCrawler constructor.

Example usage:

const crawler = new CheerioCrawler({
    async requestHandler({ request, response, body, contentType, $ }) {
        const data = [];

        // Do some data extraction from the page with Cheerio.
        $('.some-collection').each((index, el) => {
            data.push({ title: $(el).find('.some-title').text() });
        });

        // Save the data to dataset.
        await Dataset.pushData({
            url: request.url,
            html: body,
            data,
        })
    },
});

await crawler.run([
    'http://www.example.com/page-1',
    'http://www.example.com/page-2',
]);

Hierarchy

Index

Constructors

Properties

Methods

Constructors

constructor

Properties

optionalinheritedautoscaledPool

autoscaledPool?: AutoscaledPool

A reference to the underlying AutoscaledPool class that manages the concurrency of the crawler.

NOTE: This property is only initialized after calling the crawler.run() function. We can use it to change the concurrency settings on the fly, to pause the crawler by calling autoscaledPool.pause() or to abort it by calling autoscaledPool.abort().

readonlyinheritedconfig

config: Configuration = ...

inheritedhasFinishedBefore

hasFinishedBefore: boolean = false

readonlyinheritedlog

log: Log

optionalinheritedproxyConfiguration

proxyConfiguration?: ProxyConfiguration

A reference to the underlying ProxyConfiguration class that manages the crawler's proxies. Only available if used by the crawler.

optionalinheritedrequestList

requestList?: IRequestList

A reference to the underlying RequestList class that manages the crawler's requests. Only available if used by the crawler.

optionalinheritedrequestQueue

requestQueue?: RequestProvider

Dynamic queue of URLs to be processed. This is useful for recursive crawling of websites. A reference to the underlying RequestQueue class that manages the crawler's requests. Only available if used by the crawler.

readonlyinheritedrouter

router: RouterHandler<{ request: LoadedRequest<Request<any>> } & Omit<CheerioCrawlingContext<any, any>, request>> = ...

Default Router instance that will be used if we don't specify any requestHandler. See router.addHandler() and router.addDefaultHandler().

inheritedrunning

running: boolean = false

optionalinheritedsessionPool

sessionPool?: SessionPool

A reference to the underlying SessionPool class that manages the crawler's sessions. Only available if used by the crawler.

readonlyinheritedstats

stats: Statistics

A reference to the underlying Statistics class that collects and logs run statistics for requests.

Methods

inheritedaddRequests

  • Adds requests to the queue in batches. By default, it will resolve after the initial batch is added, and continue adding the rest in background. You can configure the batch size via batchSize option and the sleep time in between the batches via waitBetweenBatchesMillis. If you want to wait for all batches to be added to the queue, you can use the waitForAllRequestsToBeAdded promise you get in the response object.

    This is an alias for calling addRequestsBatched() on the implicit RequestQueue for this crawler instance.

    Parameters

    Returns Promise<CrawlerAddRequestsResult>

inheritedexportData

  • Retrieves all the data from the default crawler Dataset and exports them to the specified format. Supported formats are currently 'json' and 'csv', and will be inferred from the path automatically.

    Parameters

    Returns Promise<Data[]>

inheritedgetData

inheritedgetDataset

  • getDataset(idOrName?: string): Promise<Dataset<Dictionary>>

  • Retrieves the specified Dataset, or the default crawler Dataset.

    Parameters

    • optionalidOrName: string

    Returns Promise<Dataset<Dictionary>>

inheritedgetRequestQueue

inheritedpushData

  • pushData(data: Dictionary | Dictionary[], datasetIdOrName?: string): Promise<void>

  • Pushes data to the specified Dataset, or the default crawler Dataset by calling Dataset.pushData.

    Parameters

    • data: Dictionary | Dictionary[]
    • optionaldatasetIdOrName: string

    Returns Promise<void>

inheritedrun

  • Runs the crawler. Returns a promise that gets resolved once all the requests are processed. We can use the requests parameter to enqueue the initial requests - it is a shortcut for running crawler.addRequests() before the crawler.run().

    Parameters

    Returns Promise<FinalStatistics>

inheritedsetStatusMessage

  • This method is periodically called by the crawler, every statusMessageLoggingInterval seconds.

    Parameters

    Returns Promise<void>

inheriteduse

  • use(extension: CrawlerExtension): void

  • EXPERIMENTAL Function for attaching CrawlerExtensions such as the Unblockers.

    Parameters

    • extension: CrawlerExtension

      Crawler extension that overrides the crawler configuration.

    Returns void

inheriteduseState

  • useState(defaultValue?: State): Promise<State>

  • Parameters

    • defaultValue: State = ...

    Returns Promise<State>

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