Book Image

Go Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

By : Vincent Smith
Book Image

Go Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

By: Vincent Smith

Overview of this book

Web scraping is the process of extracting information from the web using various tools that perform scraping and crawling. Go is emerging as the language of choice for scraping using a variety of libraries. This book will quickly explain to you, how to scrape data data from various websites using Go libraries such as Colly and Goquery. The book starts with an introduction to the use cases of building a web scraper and the main features of the Go programming language, along with setting up a Go environment. It then moves on to HTTP requests and responses and talks about how Go handles them. You will also learn about a number of basic web scraping etiquettes. You will be taught how to navigate through a website, using a breadth-first and then a depth-first search, as well as find and follow links. You will get to know about the ways to track history in order to avoid loops and to protect your web scraper using proxies. Finally the book will cover the Go concurrency model, and how to run scrapers in parallel, along with large-scale distributed web scraping.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Distributed scraping with dataflowkit

Now that you have seen the progression of building fully featured web scrapers, I would like to introduce you to the most complete web scraping project in Go that has been built today. dataflowkit, by GitHub user slotix, is a fully featured web scraper that is modular and extensible for building scalable, large-scale distributed applications. It allows for multiple backends for storage of cached and computed information and is capable of both simple HTTP requests as well as driving browsers through the DevTools Protocol. Going above and beyond, dataflowkit has both a command-line interface and a JSON format to declare web scraping scripts.

The architecture of dataflowkit is separated into two distinct parts: fetching and parsing. Both Fetch and Parse phases of the system are built as separate binaries to be run on different machines. They...