memorious4 4.0.0

A minimalistic, recursive web crawling library for Python.

The solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world.

—Funes the Memorious, Jorge Luis Borges

memorious is a light-weight web scraping toolkit. It supports scrapers that collect structured or un-structured data. This includes the following use cases:

• Make crawlers modular and simple tasks reusable

• Provide utility functions to do common tasks such as data storage, HTTP session management

• Integrate crawlers with the Aleph and FollowTheMoney ecosystem

• Get out of your way as much as possible

Design

When writing a scraper, you often need to paginate through through an index page, then download an HTML page for each result and finally parse that page and insert or update a record in a database.

memorious handles this by managing a set of crawlers, each of which can be composed of multiple stages. Each stage is implemented using a Python function, which can be reused across different crawlers.

The basic steps of writing a Memorious crawler:

1. Make YAML crawler configuration file

2. Add different stages

3. Write code for stage operations (optional)

4. Test, rinse, repeat

Documentation

The documentation for Memorious is available at docs.investigraph.dev/lib/memorious. Feel free to edit the source files in the docs folder and send pull requests for improvements.

To serve the documentation locally, run mkdocs serve