Act Crawler

Apify act compatible with Apify crawler - same input ⟹ same output.

WARNING: This is an early version and may contain some bugs and may not be fully compatible with crawler product.

WARNING 2: It's also unstable and every version may contain breaking changes.

Usage

There are two ways how to use this act:

• pass crawler configuration as input of this act. Int his case the input looks like:

  {
    "startUrls": [{ "key": "", "value": "https://news.ycombinator.com" }],
    "maxParallelRequests": 10,
    "pageFunction": "function() { return context.jQuery('title').text(); }",
    "injectJQuery": true,
    "clickableElementsSelector": "a"
  }
  

• pass ID of own crawler and act fetches the configuration from that crawler. You can override any attribute you want in the act input:

  {
    "crawlerId": "snoftq230dkcxm7w0",
    "clickableElementsSelector": "a"
  }
  

This acts persists it's state in key-value store during the run and finally stores the results in files RESULTS-1.json, RESULTS-2.json, RESULTS-3.json, … .

Input attributes

Crawler compatible attributes

Act supports following crawler configuration attributes (for documentation see https://www.apify.com/docs/crawler#home):

Attribute	Type	Default	Required	Description
startUrls	[{key: String, value: String}]	[]	yes
pseudoUrls	[{key: String, value: String}]
clickableElementsSelector	String			Currently supports only links (a elements)
pageFunction	Function		yes
interceptRequest	Function
injectJQuery	Boolean
injectUnderscore	Boolean
maxPageRetryCount	Number	3
maxParallelRequests	Number	1
maxCrawledPagesPerSlave	Number	50
pageLoadTimeout	Number	30s
customData	Any
maxCrawledPages	Number
maxOutputPages	Number
considerUrlFragment	Boolean	false
maxCrawlDepth	Number
maxInfiniteScrollHeight	Number
cookies	[Object]			Currently used for all requests
pageFunctionTimeout	Number	60000
disableWebSecurity	Boolean	false

Additional attributes

Attribute	Type	Default	Required	Description
maxPagesPerFile	Number	1000	yes	Number of outputed pages saved into 1 results file.
browserInstanceCount	Number	10	yes	Number of browser instances to be used in the pool.
crawlerId	String			ID of a crawler to fetch configuration from.
urlList	String			Url of the file containing urls to be enqueued as startUrls. This file must either contain one url per line or urlListRegExp configuration attribute must be provided.
urlListRegExp	String			RegExp to match array of urls from urlList file ^. This RegExp is used this way against the file and must return array of url strings: contentOfFile.match(new RegExp(urlListRegExp, 'g')); For example `(http
userAgent	String			User agent to be used in browser
customProxies	[String]			Array of proxies to be used for browsing.
dumpio	Boolean	true		If true then Chrome console log will be piped into act run log.
saveSimplifiedResults	Boolean	false		If true then also simplified version of results will be outputted.
fullStackTrace	Boolean	false		If true then request.errorInfo and act log will contain full stack trace of each error.

Local usage

To run act locally you must have NodeJS installed:

• Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/apifytech/act-crawler.git
• Install dependencies: npm install
• Configure input in /kv-store-dev/INPUT
• Run it: npm run local