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Version: 2.3

BasicCrawlerOptions

Properties​

handleRequestFunction​

Type: HandleRequest

User-provided function that performs the logic of the crawler. It is called for each URL to crawl.

The function receives the following object as an argument:

{
  request: Request,
  session: Session,
  crawler: BasicCrawler,
}

where the Request instance represents the URL to crawl.

The function must return a promise, which is then awaited by the crawler.

If the function throws an exception, the crawler will try to re-crawl the request later, up to option.maxRequestRetries times. If all the retries fail, the crawler calls the function provided to the handleFailedRequestFunction parameter. To make this work, you should always let your function throw exceptions rather than catch them. The exceptions are logged to the request using the Request.pushErrorMessage() function.

requestList​

Type: RequestList

Static list of URLs to be processed. Either requestList or requestQueue option must be provided (or both).

requestQueue​

Type: RequestQueue

Dynamic queue of URLs to be processed. This is useful for recursive crawling of websites. Either requestList or requestQueue option must be provided (or both).

handleRequestTimeoutSecs​

Type: number = 60

Timeout in which the function passed as handleRequestFunction needs to finish, in seconds.

handleFailedRequestFunction​

Type: HandleFailedRequest

A function to handle requests that failed more than option.maxRequestRetries times.

The function receives the following object as an argument:

{
  request: Request,
  error: Error,
  session: Session,
  crawler: BasicCrawler,
}

where the Request instance corresponds to the failed request, and the Error instance represents the last error thrown during processing of the request.

See source code for the default implementation of this function.

maxRequestRetries​

Type: number = 3

Indicates how many times the request is retried if BasicCrawlerOptions.handleRequestFunction fails.

maxRequestsPerCrawl​

Type: number

Maximum number of pages that the crawler will open. The crawl will stop when this limit is reached. Always set this value in order to prevent infinite loops in misconfigured crawlers. Note that in cases of parallel crawling, the actual number of pages visited might be slightly higher than this value.

autoscaledPoolOptions​

Type: AutoscaledPoolOptions

Custom options passed to the underlying AutoscaledPool constructor. Note that the runTaskFunction and isTaskReadyFunction options are provided by BasicCrawler and cannot be overridden. However, you can provide a custom implementation of isFinishedFunction.

minConcurrency​

Type: number = 1

Sets the minimum concurrency (parallelism) for the crawl. Shortcut to the corresponding AutoscaledPool option.

WARNING: If you set this value too high with respect to the available system memory and CPU, your crawler will run extremely slow or crash. If you're not sure, just keep the default value and the concurrency will scale up automatically.

maxConcurrency​

Type: number = 1000

Sets the maximum concurrency (parallelism) for the crawl. Shortcut to the corresponding AutoscaledPool option.

useSessionPool​

Type: boolean = true

Basic crawler will initialize the SessionPool with the corresponding sessionPoolOptions. The session instance will be than available in the handleRequestFunction.

sessionPoolOptions​

Type: SessionPoolOptions

The configuration options for SessionPool to use.