CrawlingTools

CrawlingTools is a modular software toolkit for building, deploying, and maintaining web crawlers and data-extraction pipelines. It provides a configurable suite of components that allow users to define fetchers, parsers, transformers, and storage adapters, enabling end-to-end workflows from crawling to data delivery. The tool emphasizes flexibility and scalability, supporting both single-machine runs and distributed deployments.

The architecture centers on a core engine that coordinates tasks across pluggable modules. Fetchers retrieve web content using configurable user agents, proxies, and retry policies; parsers extract structured data with CSS selectors, XPath, or custom rules; and data transformers normalize data into consistent schemas. A scheduling and queue system manages crawl priorities, while a storage layer supports SQL, NoSQL, or flat-file outputs. An API and command-line interface provide programmatic control and integration with external systems.

Key features include polite crawling with rate limiting and auto-throttling, robots.txt compliance, session management for authenticated sites, and support for distributed crawling through worker clusters. The system offers templates and a plugin ecosystem for common tasks such as login workflows and export connectors to databases, data lakes, or message queues. It also includes monitoring, logging, and retry analytics to help operators optimize performance.

CrawlingTools is maintained by a global community and is available under an open-source license. It supports multiple platforms and containerized deployment with Docker and Kubernetes. Typical users include researchers, data engineers, and product teams performing market intelligence, price monitoring, and content aggregation.

See also: web scraping, web crawler, robots.txt, data extraction, data pipeline.