scrapy-delta-guard 0.0.3

ScrapyDeltaGuard - data-drift detection for Scrapy

🛡️ Delta Guard

Delta Guard is a lightweight, production-ready plugin for Scrapy projects that detects and manages data deltas (changes) between newly scraped items and existing database records.
It helps maintain data integrity, reduces false updates, and can automatically trigger alerts (e.g., JIRA tickets) when meaningful changes occur.

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🚀 Why use Delta Guard?

Large-scale crawlers and ETL pipelines commonly face:

• layout or markup changes on target sites,
• formatting differences (phone 123-456 vs 123456),
• transient incorrect data in sponsored or related blocks,
• and other causes of noisy updates.

Delta Guard helps you:

• Detect real content changes, not formatting noise.
• Avoid cascading bad writes by stopping crawls if many fields drift.
• Integrate without changing your existing item pipelines.
• Optionally notify downstream systems (JIRA, Slack, email).

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⚙️ Quick Start

Add the following to your Scrapy project's settings.py:

EXTENSIONS = {
    "delta_guard.extension.DeltaGuardExtension": 500,
}

DELTA_GUARD_ENABLED = True
DELTA_GUARD_DB_OBJECT = profile  # ORM instance, dict, or variable
DELTA_GUARD_DEFAULT_THRESHOLD = 0.05

DELTA_GUARD_FIELDS_CONFIG = [
    {"name": "phone"},
    {"name": "email"},
    {"name": "address", "threshold": 0.1},
]

DELTA_GUARD_BATCH_SIZE = 100
DELTA_GUARD_DB_NONE_IGNORE = True
DELTA_GUARD_SPIDER_NONE_IGNORE = False

# Optional Jira integration
# DELTA_GUARD_JIRA_FUNC = "myproject.utils.jira_ticket"

🧩 How It Works
Delta Guard compares each scraped item with its corresponding record from the database (using SQLAlchemy ORM, dicts, or variables).
For every field defined in DELTA_GUARD_FIELDS_CONFIG, it measures the difference between old and new values.
If a delta exceeds its threshold, it accumulates that difference in memory.
Every DELTA_GUARD_BATCH_SIZE items, it evaluates the overall delta for the batch.
If the drift surpasses acceptable limits:

• Delta Guard halts the spider to prevent further corruption.
• Optionally, it triggers a JIRA ticket or alert function.

⚡ Configuration Reference

Setting	Type	Default	Description
DELTA_GUARD_ENABLED	bool	False	Enables or disables Delta Guard.
DELTA_GUARD_DEFAULT_THRESHOLD	float	0.05	Default allowed delta (5%).
DELTA_GUARD_FIELDS_CONFIG	list[dict]	–	Field-level delta config.
DELTA_GUARD_BATCH_SIZE	int	100	Number of items per evaluation batch.
DELTA_GUARD_DB_NONE_IGNORE	bool	True	Ignore if DB value is None.
DELTA_GUARD_SPIDER_NONE_IGNORE	bool	False	Ignore if spider provides None.
DELTA_GUARD_JIRA_FUNC	str	None	Optional dotted path to alert handler.
DELTA_GUARD_DB_OBJECT	str/obj	None	ORM, dict, or variable name for DB object.

🧠 Example Behavior

Field	DB Value	Spider Value	Result
phone	1234567890	123-456-7890	✅ Ignored (minor format change)
email	[e-mail]	[e-mail]	⚠️ Delta exceeds threshold (alert)
address	None	123 Main St	✅ Ignored if DELTA_GUARD_DB_NONE_IGNORE=True

📦 Installation

pip install scrapy-delta-guard

Then enable it via your Scrapy project’s settings.py.

🧰 Optional Integration
If you wish to auto-create JIRA tickets (or alerts), define a handler:

# myproject/utils.py
def jira_ticket(title: str, description: str):
    print(f"[JIRA] {title}: {description}")

and set:
DELTA_GUARD_JIRA_FUNC = "myproject.utils.jira_ticket"

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