HNCrawl
A scrapy-based Hacker News crawler.
Introduction
HNCrawl is a tiny, simple scrapy-based crawler which grabs the html
content of pages linked to the front page of hacker news.
Examples
Installation
$ pip install scrapy
$ git clone [email protected]:mvanveen/hncrawl.git
Scraping
Note: Please be sure to keep in mind that the Crawl-Delay value set in the HN robots.txt file is set to 30 seconds. Please be sure to avoid using the scraper more than once per 30 seconds!
Scrape the links from the front page of HN
$ scrapy crawl hnspider
Scrape items and return json summary of items scraped into items.json
$ scrapy crawl alias_scrape -o items.json -t json
Output
Here is an example file hierarchy. Folders are a hex digest of the SHA1 hash of the hacker news item url.
βββ out
βΒ Β βββ 000f86c7547b47a700dee0879a0fe08b4597360f
βΒ Β βΒ Β βββ index.html
βΒ Β βββ 0190cbad182ab3bc9a92482d169f38e363ca3c57
βΒ Β βΒ Β βββ index.html
βΒ Β βββ 02bae9642c8dd4b75a593c1c42beff62824ee8fc
βΒ Β βΒ Β βββ index.html
βΒ Β βββ 05c1460571f0ac45f77bf2ecbd3cba8b85c20621
βΒ Β βΒ Β βββ index.html
βΒ Β βββ 0b1587a3dbe9996d10a0fd3250f75462ebd59a0b
βΒ Β βΒ Β βββ index.html
βΒ Β βββ 0c5c67585004e03341e6a87d2db5257b93337b86
βΒ Β βΒ Β βββ
The JSON summary of news items look like this:
{'title': u'EFF Wins Protection for Time Zone Database',
'url': u'https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-wins-protection-time-zone-database'}
Dependencies
License
HNCrawl is MIT licensed.