Scrapy Nimble Middleware

scrapy-nimble is a Scrapy Downloader Middleware that helps to integrate Scrapy with Nimble Web API.

Install

You can install scrapy-nimble as a regular Python package from PyPI using:

pip install scrapy-nimble

Configuration

1. If you don't have it yet, open an account with Nimble.

2. Provide your credentials and enable the middleware through Scrapy settings.

   # settings.py
   NIMBLE_ENABLED = True
   
   NIMBLE_USERNAME = "username"
   NIMBLE_PASSWORD = "password"

3. Add the downloader middleware to your DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES Scrapy setting.

   # settings.py
   DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
       "scrapy_nimble.middlewares.NimbleWebApiMiddleware": 570,
   }

   If you have scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcompression.HttpCompressionMiddleware enabled (it is enabled by default in DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE setting with default order equal to 590), configure scrapy-nimble middleware before it.

Basic Usage

Once the downloader middleware is properly configured, every request goes through the Nimble's Web API. There is no need to change anything in your spider's code.

Real-time URL request

scrapy-nimble uses Nimble Web API with Real-time URL requests. In addition to the default GET request for a specific URL, this API provides some extra options that allow you to execute geolocated requests, render dynamic content, among others.

Right now the following request options can be used. Check the documentation for usage and the valid values that can be provided. If the option is not given, the default value from Web API will be used.

• method
• country
• locale
• headers
• cookies
• render
• render_options

Add the options you want to be used inside the meta key of your request, appending nimble_ to the option name such as:

# Inside your spider
yield scrapy.Request(
   "https://nimbleway.com",
   meta={
      "nimble_country": "DE",
      "nimble_locale": "uk",
      "nimble_render": True,
   }
)

Development

We suggest the use of pyenv to manage your Python version and create an isolated environment where you can safely develop. After installing it, you can prepare the environment using the following commands:

$ pyenv virtualenv 3.11.6 myvenv
$ pyenv activate myvenv
$ python -m pip install -e .

To keep a standard in code formatting and do some linter checks, we use pre-commit hooks. Install pre-commit package and install the project hooks using:

$ pre-commit install

Now you are ready to start development.