====== dirbot

This is a Scrapy project to scrape websites from public web directories.

This project is only meant for educational purposes.

Items

The items scraped by this project are websites, and the item is defined in the class::

dirbot.items.Website

See the source code for more details.

Spiders

This project contains one spider called dmoz that you can see by running::

scrapy list

Spider: dmoz

The dmoz spider scrapes the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), and it's based on the dmoz spider described in the Scrapy tutorial_

This spider doesn't crawl the entire dmoz.org site but only a few pages by default (defined in the start_pages attribute). These pages are:

• http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/
• http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/

So, if you run the spider regularly (with scrapy crawl dmoz) it will scrape only those two pages.

.. _Scrapy tutorial: http://doc.scrapy.org/intro/tutorial.html

Pipelines

Filtering by words

A pipeline to filter out websites containing certain forbidden words in their description. This pipeline is defined in the class::

dirbot.pipelines.FilterWordsPipeline

Requiring certain item fields

A pipeline to discard items that lack of certain fields. This pipeline is defined in the class::

dirbot.pipelines.RequiredFieldsPipeline

Storing items in a MySQL database

A pipeline to store (insert or update) scraped items in a MySQL database. This pipeline is defined in the class::

dirbot.pipelines.MySQLStorePipeline

The database schema is defined in db/mysql.sql and the settings file contains the default MYSQL_* settings values. The scraped items will be stored in the website database table.

.. note::

It is *required* to have set up the database schema *before* running the spider.