Bottom-feeding fun!
Flatfish is a lib to scrape HTML based on a CSV with CSS selectors and configurable attributes (eg, page titles). The ultimate goal of Flatfish is to prep and load the HTML into Drupal--there is an accompanying Drupal module.
Flatfish is on Rubygems, so you can just gem install flatfish. But if you are starting from scratch:
- We're using Ruby 2.0, it's probably easiest to use rvm, rbenv, or chruby to get set up.
- At the moment, Flatfish is setup to use MySQL, so you will need to install the mysql2 gem dependencies, notably libmysqlclient-dev.
- Flatfish uses Nokogiri to parse the HTML so install it and see the important note below.
- From here you should be able to
gem install flatfishwithout any issues.
- As Flatfish scrapes the HTML over-the-wire, it can be a bit slow (say 10 minutes for 500 pages), but you can speed things up by pointing to a local copy of your site by entering a value for
local_sourcein the config.yml file (see the example directory). - You may want to check your MySQL config, the default max_allowed_packet setting is not suitable for inserting PDFs and other large blobs (256MB should be enough but the error is usually cryptic "MySQL server has gone away").
- There is a bug in libxml2.90 and libxml2.91! Odd nth-child selectors don't work :(. Current versions of Nokogiri (1.61+) come bundled with libxml, but older versions used the system's. See Nokogiri issue and the libxml2 optimization bug cause.
- Create a MySQL database
- Make a directory for you CSV and configuration file
- Create CSVs of URLs with CSS selectors (see the example directory), one for each Drupal Content Type
- Configure your YAML with project specifics (see config.yml in the example directory)
- Run
flatfishin your project directory (with the CSV and the config file) - Additional Flatfish runs will update/overwrite database content based on URL.
(The MIT License)
Copyright (c) 2012 Tim Loudon
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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