Crawlbase API middleware for Scrapy

Processes Scrapy requests using Crawlbase services either with Normal or Javascript tokens

Installing

Choose a way of installing:

• Clone the repository inside your Scrapy project and run the following:

python setup.py install

• Or use PyPi Python package manager. pip install scrapy-crawlbase-middleware

Then in your Scrapy settings.py add the following lines:

# Activate the middleware
CRAWLBASE_ENABLED = True

# The Crawlbase API token you wish to use, either normal of javascript token
CRAWLBASE_TOKEN = 'your token'

# Enable the middleware
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    'scrapy_crawlbase.CrawlbaseMiddleware': 610
}

Usage

Use the scrapy_crawlbase.CrawlbaseRequest instead of the scrapy built-in Request. The scrapy_crawlbase.CrawlbaseRequest accepts additional arguments, used in the Crawlbase API:

from scrapy_crawlbase import CrawlbaseRequest

class ExampleScraper(Spider):

    def start_requests(self):
        yield CrawlbaseRequest(
            "http://target-url",
            callback=self.parse_result,
            device='desktop',
            country='US',
            page_wait=1000,
            ajax_wait=True,
            dont_filter=True
        )

The target url will be replaced with the Crawlbase API url and parameters will be encoded into the url by the middleware automatically.

Smart AI Proxy usage

The Smart AI Proxy is a standard rotating HTTP(S) proxy endpoint, so it can be used from Scrapy without this middleware: set it as the request proxy with your token as the proxy username and an empty password. Crawlbase handles proxy rotation, retries and anti-bot bypass on its side.

import scrapy

class ExampleSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'example'

    def start_requests(self):
        yield scrapy.Request(
            'https://httpbin.org/ip',
            meta={'proxy': 'http://YOUR_TOKEN:@smartproxy.crawlbase.com:8012'},
            callback=self.parse,
        )

    def parse(self, response):
        self.logger.info(response.text)

Note: the proxy re-signs HTTPS traffic; Scrapy's default TLS context factory does not verify certificates, so no extra configuration is needed. The example uses the plain-HTTP proxy port 8012, which works with every Scrapy version. See the Smart AI Proxy documentation for all options.

If you have questions or need help using the library, please open an issue or contact us.

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