Build a Website Scraper with Astra DB + Python

180 minutes, Advanced, Start Building

Learn how to scrape websites with Astra DB, Python, Selenium, Requests HTML, Celery, & FastAPI by following along with CodingEntrepreneurs' video, located here.

Quick Start

• Signup for DataStax Astra, or login to your already existing account.
• Create an Astra DB Database if you don't already have one.

• Create an Astra DB Keyspace called sag_python_scraper in your database.

• Generate an Application Token with the role of Database Administrator for the Organization that your Astra DB is in.

• Get your secure connect bundle from the connect page of your database and save it to your project folder. Rename it to bundle.zip

• Setup your system: Below is a preflight checklist to ensure you system is fully setup to work with this course. All guides and setup can be found in the setup directory of this repo.

  • Install Selenium & Chromedriver - setup guide
  • Install Redis - setup guide
  • Create a virtual environment & install dependencies
  • Setup an account with DataStax
  • Create your first AstraDB and get API credentials
  • Use cassandra-driver to verify your connection to AstraDB

How this works

Follow along in this video tutorial: https://youtu.be/NyDT3KkscSk.

This series is broken up into 4 parts:

• Scraping How to scrape and parse data from nearly any website with Selenium & Requests HTML.
• Data models how to store and validate data with cassandra-driver, pydantic, and AstraDB.
• Worker & Scheduling how to schedule periodic tasks (ie scraping) integrated with Redis & AstraDB
• Presentation How to combine the above steps in as robust web application service

Here's what each tool is used for:

• Python 3.9 download - programming the logic.
• AstraDB sign up - highly perfomant and scalable database service by DataStax. AstraDB is a Cassandra NoSQL Database. Cassandra is used by Netflix, Discord, Apple, and many others to handle astonding amounts of data.
• Selenium docs - an automated web browsing experience that allows:
  • Run all web-browser actions through code
  • Loads JavaScript heavy websites
  • Can perform standard user interaction like clicks, form submits, logins, etc.
• Requests HTML docs - we're going to use this to parse an HTML document extracted from Selenium
• Celery docs - Celery providers worker processes that will allow us to schedule when we need to scrape websites. We'll be using redis as our task queue.
• FastAPI docs - as a web application framework to Display and monitor web scraping results from anywhere