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12/2/2023

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Build a Website Scraper with Astra DB + Python Examples | DataStax

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This resource is based on an article originally published here.

Learn how to scrape websites with Astra DB, Python, Selenium, Requests HTML, Celery, & FastAPI.

180 minutes • Advanced

Updated October 19, 2021


180 minutes, Advanced, Start Building

Learn how to scrape websites with Astra DB, Python, Selenium, Requests HTML, Celery, & FastAPI by following along with CodingEntrepreneurs' video, located here.

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Quick Start

  • Signup for DataStax Astra, or login to your already existing account.

  • Create an Astra DB Database if you don't already have one.

  • Create an Astra DB Keyspace called sag_python_scraper in your database.

  • Generate an Application Token with the role of Database Administrator for the Organization that your Astra DB is in.

  • Get your secure connect bundle from the connect page of your database and save it to your project folder. Rename it to bundle.zip

  • Setup your system: Below is a preflight checklist to ensure you system is fully setup to work with this course. All guides and setup can be found in the setup directory of this repo.

    • Install Selenium & Chromedriver - setup guide

    • Install Redis - setup guide

    • Create a virtual environment & install dependencies

    • Setup an account with DataStax

    • Create your first AstraDB and get API credentials

    • Use cassandra-driver to verify your connection to AstraDB

How this works

Follow along in this video tutorial: https://youtu.be/NyDT3KkscSk.

This series is broken up into 4 parts:

  • Scraping How to scrape and parse data from nearly any website with Selenium & Requests HTML.
  • Data models how to store and validate data with cassandra-driver, pydantic, and AstraDB.
  • Worker & Scheduling how to schedule periodic tasks (ie scraping) integrated with Redis & AstraDB
  • Presentation How to combine the above steps in as robust web application service

Here's what each tool is used for:

  • Python 3.9 download - programming the logic.
  • AstraDB sign up - highly perfomant and scalable database service by DataStax. AstraDB is a Cassandra NoSQL Database. Cassandra is used by Netflix, Discord, Apple, and many others to handle astonding amounts of data.
  • Selenium docs - an automated web browsing experience that allows:
    • Run all web-browser actions through code
    • Loads JavaScript heavy websites
    • Can perform standard user interaction like clicks, form submits, logins, etc.
  • Requests HTML docs - we're going to use this to parse an HTML document extracted from Selenium
  • Celery docs - Celery providers worker processes that will allow us to schedule when we need to scrape websites. We'll be using redis as our task queue.
  • FastAPI docs - as a web application framework to Display and monitor web scraping results from anywhere

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