Initialization & setting up

When you extract links from a web page, you often end up with a lot of irrelevant URLs. Learn how to filter the links to only keep the ones you need.

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The Crawlee CLI makes it extremely easy for us to set up a project in Crawlee and hit the ground running. Navigate to the directory you'd like your project's folder to live, then open up a terminal instance and run the following command:

npx crawlee create amazon-crawler

Once you run this command, you'll get prompted into a menu which you can navigate using your arrow keys. Each of these options will generate a different boilerplate code when selected. We're going to work with CheerioCrawler today, so we'll select the CheerioCrawler template project template, and then press Enter.

Once it's completed, open up the amazon-crawler folder that was generated by the npx crawlee create command. We're going to modify the main.js boilerplate to fit our needs:

// main.js
import { CheerioCrawler, KeyValueStore, log } from 'crawlee';
import { router } from './routes.js';

// Grab our keyword from the input
const { keyword } = await KeyValueStore.getInput();

const crawler = new CheerioCrawler({
    requestHandler: router,

    // If you have access to Apify Proxy, you can use residential proxies and
    // high retry count which helps with blocking
    // If you don't, your local IP address will likely be fine for a few requests if you scrape slowly.
    // proxyConfiguration: await Actor.createProxyConfiguration({ groups: ['RESIDENTIAL'] }),
    // maxRequestRetries: 10,
});

log.info('Starting the crawl.');
await crawler.run([{
    // Turn the keyword into a link we can make a request with
    url: `https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=${keyword}`,
    label: 'START',
    userData: {
        keyword,
    },
}]);
log.info('Crawl finished.');

// routes.js
import { createCheerioRouter } from 'crawlee';

export const router = createCheerioRouter();

router.addDefaultHandler(({ log }) => {
    log.info('Route reached.');
});

Finally, we'll add the following input file to INPUT.json in the project's root directory (next to package.json, node_modules and others)

{
  "keyword": "iphone"
}

This is how we'll be inputting data into our scraper from now on. Don't worry though, from now on, we'll only need to work in the main.js and routes.js files!

Next up

Cool! We're ready. But let's discuss a bit about modularity before moving forward!