Book Image

Python Web Scraping Cookbook

By : Michael Heydt
Book Image

Python Web Scraping Cookbook

By: Michael Heydt

Overview of this book

Python Web Scraping Cookbook is a solution-focused book that will teach you techniques to develop high-performance scrapers and deal with crawlers, sitemaps, forms automation, Ajax-based sites, caches, and more. You'll explore a number of real-world scenarios where every part of the development/product life cycle will be fully covered. You will not only develop the skills needed to design and develop reliable performance data flows, but also deploy your codebase to AWS. If you are involved in software engineering, product development, or data mining (or are interested in building data-driven products), you will find this book useful as each recipe has a clear purpose and objective. Right from extracting data from the websites to writing a sophisticated web crawler, the book's independent recipes will be a godsend. This book covers Python libraries, requests, and BeautifulSoup. You will learn about crawling, web spidering, working with Ajax websites, paginated items, and more. You will also learn to tackle problems such as 403 errors, working with proxy, scraping images, and LXML. By the end of this book, you will be able to scrape websites more efficiently and able to deploy and operate your scraper in the cloud.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Creating an ECS cluster

Elastic Container Service (ECS) is an AWS service that runs your Docker containers in the cloud. There is a lot of power (and detail) in using ECS. We will look at a simple deployment that runs our containers on a single EC2 virtual machine. Our goal is to get our scraper to the cloud. Extensive detail on using ECS to scale out the scraper is for another time (and book).

How to do it

We start by creating an ECR cluster using the AWS CLI. The we will create one EC2 virtual machine in the cluster to run our containers.

I've included a shell file, in the 11/06 folder, names create-cluster-complete.sh, which runs through all of these commands in one run.

There are number of steps to getting...