[中文](https://github.com/tikazyq/crawlab/blob/master/README-zh.md) | English
Celery-based web crawler admin platform for managing distributed web spiders regardless of languages and frameworks.
[Demo](http://114.67.75.98:8080) | [Documentation](https://tikazyq.github.io/crawlab-docs)
## Pre-requisite
- Python 3.6+
- Node.js 8.12+
- MongoDB
- Redis
## Installation
Threee methods:
1. [Docker](https://tikazyq.github.io/crawlab/Installation/Docker.md) (Recommended)
2. [Direct Deploy](https://tikazyq.github.io/crawlab/Installation/Direct.md)
3. [Preview](https://tikazyq.github.io/crawlab/Installation/Direct.md) (Quick start)
## Screenshot
#### Home Page
#### Spider List
#### Spider Detail - Overview
#### Spider Detail - Analytics
#### Task Detail - Results
#### Cron Schedule
## Architecture
Crawlab's architecture is very similar to Celery's, but a few more modules including Frontend, Spiders and Flower are added to feature the crawling management functionality.
### Nodes
Nodes are actually the workers defined in Celery. A node is running and connected to a task queue, redis for example, to receive and run tasks. As spiders need to be deployed to the nodes, users should specify their ip addresses and ports before the deployment.
### Spiders
The spider source codes and configured crawling rules are stored on `App`, which need to be deployed to each `worker` node.
### Tasks
Tasks are triggered and run by the workers. Users can view the task status, logs and results in the task detail page.
### App
This is a Flask app that provides necessary API for common operations such as CRUD, spider deployment and task running. Each node has to run the flask app to get spiders deployed on this machine. Simply run `python manage.py app` or `python ./bin/run_app.py` to start the app.
### Broker
Broker is the same as defined in Celery. It is the queue for running async tasks.
### Frontend
Frontend is basically a Vue SPA that inherits from [Vue-Element-Admin](https://github.com/PanJiaChen/vue-element-admin) of [PanJiaChen](https://github.com/PanJiaChen). Thanks for his awesome template.
## Integration with Other Frameworks
A task is triggered via `Popen` in python `subprocess` module. A Task ID is will be defined as a variable `CRAWLAB_TASK_ID` in the shell environment to link the data to the task.
In your spider program, you should store the `CRAWLAB_TASK_ID` value in the database with key `task_id`. Then Crawlab would know how to link those results to a particular task. For now, Crawlab only supports MongoDB.
### Scrapy
Below is an example to integrate Crawlab with Scrapy in pipelines.
```python
import os
from pymongo import MongoClient
MONGO_HOST = '192.168.99.100'
MONGO_PORT = 27017
MONGO_DB = 'crawlab_test'
# scrapy example in the pipeline
class JuejinPipeline(object):
mongo = MongoClient(host=MONGO_HOST, port=MONGO_PORT)
db = mongo[MONGO_DB]
col_name = os.environ.get('CRAWLAB_COLLECTION')
if not col_name:
col_name = 'test'
col = db[col_name]
def process_item(self, item, spider):
item['task_id'] = os.environ.get('CRAWLAB_TASK_ID')
self.col.save(item)
return item
```
## Comparison with Other Frameworks
There are existing spider management frameworks. So why use Crawlab?
The reason is that most of the existing platforms are depending on Scrapyd, which limits the choice only within python and scrapy. Surely scrapy is a great web crawl frameowrk, but it cannot do everything.
Crawlab is easy to use, general enough to adapt spiders in any language and any framework. It has also a beautiful frontend interface for users to manage spiders much more easily.
|Framework | Type | Distributed | Frontend | Scrapyd-Dependent |
|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| [Crawlab](https://github.com/tikazyq/crawlab) | Admin Platform | Y | Y | N
| [Gerapy](https://github.com/Gerapy/Gerapy) | Admin Platform | Y | Y | Y
| [SpiderKeeper](https://github.com/DormyMo/SpiderKeeper) | Admin Platform | Y | Y | Y
| [ScrapydWeb](https://github.com/my8100/scrapydweb) | Admin Platform | Y | Y | Y
| [Scrapyd](https://github.com/scrapy/scrapyd) | Web Service | Y | N | N/A
## Community & Sponsorship
If you feel Crawlab could benefit your daily work or your company, please add the author's Wechat account noting "Crawlab" to enter the discussion group. Or you scan the Alipay QR code below to give us a reward to upgrade our teamwork software or buy a coffee.
