scrapelib is a library for making requests to less-than-reliable websites.

Source: https://github.com/jamesturk/scrapelib

Documentation: https://jamesturk.github.io/scrapelib/

Issues: https://github.com/jamesturk/scrapelib/issues

Features

scrapelib originated as part of the Open States project to scrape the websites of all 50 state legislatures and as a result was therefore designed with features desirable when dealing with sites that have intermittent errors or require rate-limiting.

Advantages of using scrapelib over using requests as-is:

• HTTP(S) and FTP requests via an identical API
• support for simple caching with pluggable cache backends
• highly-configurable request throtting
• configurable retries for non-permanent site failures
• All of the power of the suberb requests library.

Installation

scrapelib is on PyPI, and can be installed via any standard package management tool:

poetry add scrapelib

or:

pip install scrapelib

Example Usage

  import scrapelib
  s = scrapelib.Scraper(requests_per_minute=10)

  # Grab Google front page
  s.get('http://google.com')

  # Will be throttled to 10 HTTP requests per minute
  while True:
      s.get('http://example.com')