Memorious

Memorious is a light-weight web scraping toolkit. It supports scrapers that collect structured or un-structured data.

• Make crawlers modular and simple tasks re-usable
• 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 re-used 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