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)

Storing configuration in the environment

This recipe points out a change made in the code of the API in the previous recipe to support one of the factors of a 12-Factor application. A 12-Factor app is defined as an app that is designed to be run as a software as a service. We have been moving our scraper in this direction for a while now, breaking it into components that can be run independently, as scripts, or in containers, and as we will see soon, in the cloud. You can learn all about 12-Factor apps at https://12factor.net/.

Factor-3 states that we should pass in configuration to our application through environment variables. While we definitely don't want to hardcode things, such as URLs, to external services, it also isn't best practice to use configuration files. When deploying to various environments, such as containers or the cloud, a config file will often...