Frontera is a web crawling framework consisting of crawl frontier, and distribution/scaling primitives, allowing to build a large scale online web crawler.

Frontera takes care of the logic and policies to follow during the crawl. It stores and prioritises links extracted by the crawler to decide which pages to visit next, and capable of doing it in distributed manner.

• Online operation: small requests batches, with parsing done right after fetch.
• Pluggable backend architecture: low-level storage logic is separated from crawling policy.
• Three run modes: single process, distributed spiders, distributed backend and spiders.
• Transparent data flow, allowing to integrate custom components easily using Kafka.
• Message bus abstraction, providing a way to implement your own transport (ZeroMQ and Kafka are available out of the box).
• RDBMS and HBase backends.
• Revisiting logic with RDBMS.
• Optional use of Scrapy for fetching and parsing.
• 3-clause BSD license, allowing to use in any commercial product.
• Python 3 support.

$ pip install frontera

• Main documentation at RTD
• EuroPython 2015 slides
• BigDataSpain 2015 slides

Join our Google group at https://groups.google.com/a/scrapinghub.com/forum/#!forum/frontera or check GitHub issues and pull requests.