Introduction

import ApiLink from '@site/src/components/ApiLink';

Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end-to-end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast.

Your crawlers will appear human-like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data and persistently store it in machine-readable formats, without having to worry about the technical details. And thanks to rich configuration options, you can tweak almost any aspect of Crawlee to suit your project's needs if the default settings don't cut it.

What you will learn

The goal of the introduction is to provide a step-by-step guide to the most important features of Crawlee. It will walk you through creating the simplest of crawlers that only prints text to console, all the way up to a full-featured scraper that collects links from a website and extracts data.

🛠 Features

• Single interface for HTTP and headless browser crawling
• Persistent queue for URLs to crawl (breadth & depth first)
• Pluggable storage of both tabular data and files
• Automatic scaling with available system resources
• Integrated proxy rotation and session management
• Lifecycles customizable with hooks
• CLI to bootstrap your projects
• Configurable routing, error handling and retries
• Dockerfiles ready to deploy
• Written in TypeScript with generics

👾 HTTP crawling

• Zero config HTTP2 support, even for proxies
• Automatic generation of browser-like headers
• Replication of browser TLS fingerprints
• Integrated fast HTML parsers. Cheerio and JSDOM
• Yes, you can scrape JSON APIs as well

💻 Real browser crawling

• JavaScript rendering and screenshots
• Headless and headful support
• Zero-config generation of human-like fingerprints
• Automatic browser management
• Use Playwright and Puppeteer with the same interface
• Chrome, Firefox, Webkit and many others

Next steps

Next, you will install Crawlee and learn how to bootstrap projects with the Crawlee CLI.