Crawler doesn't respect `configuration` argument

[tlinhart]

Consider this sample program:

import asyncio

from crawlee.configuration import Configuration
from crawlee.parsel_crawler import ParselCrawler, ParselCrawlingContext

async def default_handler(context: ParselCrawlingContext) -> None:
    for category in context.selector.xpath(
        '//div[@class="side_categories"]//ul/li/ul/li/a'
    ):
        await context.push_data({"category": category.xpath("normalize-space()").get()})

async def main() -> None:
    config = Configuration(persist_storage=False, write_metadata=False)
    crawler = ParselCrawler(request_handler=default_handler, configuration=config)
    await crawler.run(["https://books.toscrape.com"])
    data = await crawler.get_data()
    print(data.items)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

The configuration argument given to ParselCrawler is not respected, during the run it creates the ./storage directory and persist all the (meta)data. I have to work around it by overriding the global configuration likes this:

import asyncio

from crawlee.configuration import Configuration
from crawlee.parsel_crawler import ParselCrawler, ParselCrawlingContext

async def default_handler(context: ParselCrawlingContext) -> None:
    for category in context.selector.xpath(
        '//div[@class="side_categories"]//ul/li/ul/li/a'
    ):
        await context.push_data({"category": category.xpath("normalize-space()").get()})

async def main() -> None:
    config = Configuration.get_global_configuration()
    config.persist_storage = False
    config.write_metadata = False
    crawler = ParselCrawler(request_handler=default_handler)
    await crawler.run(["https://books.toscrape.com"])
    data = await crawler.get_data()
    print(data.items)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

[janbuchar]

Hello, and thanks for the reproduction! It seems that the problem is here:

https://github.com/apify/crawlee-python/blob/master/src/crawlee/storages/_creation_management.py#L122-L132

It looks like service_container.get_storage_client does not consider the adjusted configuration.

Also, we have a test for this - https://github.com/apify/crawlee-python/blob/master/tests/unit/basic_crawler/test_basic_crawler.py#L630-L639 - which probably fails because we're looking inside a different storage directory than the global one.