Python Crawlee & BeautifulSoup Actor Template

This template example was built with Crawlee for Python to scrape data from a website using Beautiful Soup wrapped into BeautifulSoupCrawler.

Quick Start

Once you've installed the dependencies, start the Actor:

$apify run

Once your Actor is ready, you can push it to the Apify Console:

apify login # first, you need to log in if you haven't already done so

apify push

Project Structure

.actor/
├── actor.json # Actor config: name, version, env vars, runtime settings
├── dataset_schena.json # Structure and representation of data produced by an Actor
├── input_schema.json # Input validation & Console form definition
└── output_schema.json # Specifies where an Actor stores its output
src/
└── main.py # Actor entry point and orchestrator
storage/ # Local storage (mirrors Cloud during development)
├── datasets/ # Output items (JSON objects)
├── key_value_stores/ # Files, config, INPUT
└── request_queues/ # Pending crawl requests
Dockerfile # Container image definition

For more information, see the Actor definition documentation.

How it works

This code is a Python script that uses BeautifulSoup to scrape data from a website. It then stores the website titles in a dataset.

• The crawler starts with URLs provided from the input startUrls field defined by the input schema. Number of scraped pages is limited by maxPagesPerCrawl field from the input schema.
• The crawler uses requestHandler for each URL to extract the data from the page with the BeautifulSoup library and to save the title and URL of each page to the dataset. It also logs out each result that is being saved.

What's included

• Apify SDK - toolkit for building Actors
• Crawlee for Python - web scraping and browser automation library
• Input schema - define and easily validate a schema for your Actor's input
• Dataset - store structured data where each object stored has the same attributes
• Beautiful Soup - a library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files
• Proxy configuration - rotate IP addresses to prevent blocking

Resources

• Quick Start guide for building your first Actor
• Video introduction to Python SDK
• Webinar introducing to Crawlee for Python
• Apify Python SDK documentation
• Crawlee for Python documentation
• Python tutorials in Academy
• Integration with Zapier, Make, Google Drive and others
• Video guide on getting data using Apify API

Creating Actors with templates

Getting started

For complete information see this article. To run the Actor use the following command:

$apify run

Deploy to Apify

Connect Git repository to Apify

If you've created a Git repository for the project, you can easily connect to Apify:

1. Go to Actor creation page
2. Click on Link Git Repository button

Push project on your local machine to Apify

You can also deploy the project on your local machine to Apify without the need for the Git repository.

1. Log in to Apify. You will need to provide your Apify API Token to complete this action.

   $apify login
   

2. Deploy your Actor. This command will deploy and build the Actor on the Apify Platform. You can find your newly created Actor under Actors -> My Actors.

   $apify push
   

Documentation reference

To learn more about Apify and Actors, take a look at the following resources:

• Apify SDK for JavaScript documentation
• Apify SDK for Python documentation
• Apify Platform documentation
• Join our developer community on Discord