Message bus

Is the transport layer abstraction mechanism. It provides interface and several implementations. Only one message bus can be used in crawler at the time, and it’s selected with MESSAGE_BUS setting.

Spiders process can use

class frontera.contrib.backends.remote.messagebus.MessageBusBackend(manager)

to communicate using message bus.

Built-in message bus reference

ZeroMQ

It’s the default option, implemented using lightweight ZeroMQ library in

class frontera.contrib.messagebus.zeromq.MessageBus(settings)

and can be configured using ZeroMQ message bus settings.

ZeroMQ message bus requires installed ZeroMQ library and running broker process, see Start cluster.

WARNING! ZeroMQ message bus doesn’t support yet multiple SW and DB workers, only one instance of each worker type is allowed.

Kafka

Can be selected with

class frontera.contrib.messagebus.kafkabus.MessageBus(settings)

and configured using Kafka message bus settings.

Requires running Kafka service and more suitable for large-scale web crawling.

Protocol

Depending on stream Frontera is using several message types to code it’s messages. Every message is a python native object serialized using msgpack or JSON. The codec module can be selected using MESSAGE_BUS_CODEC, and it’s required to export Encoder and Decoder classes.

Here are the classes needed to subclass to implement own codec:

class frontera.core.codec.BaseEncoder
encode_add_seeds(seeds)

Encodes add_seeds message

Parameters:seeds (list) – A list of frontier Request objects
Returns:bytes encoded message
encode_page_crawled(response)

Encodes a page_crawled message

Parameters:response (object) – A frontier Response object
Returns:bytes encoded message
encode_request_error(request, error)

Encodes a request_error message

Parameters:
  • request (object) – A frontier Request object
  • error (string) – Error description
Returns:

bytes encoded message

encode_request(request)

Encodes requests for spider feed stream.

Parameters:request (object) – Frontera Request object
Returns:bytes encoded message
encode_update_score(request, score, schedule)

Encodes update_score messages for scoring log stream.

Parameters:
  • request (object) – Frontera Request object
  • score (float) – score
  • schedule (bool) – True if document needs to be scheduled for download
Returns:

bytes encoded message

encode_new_job_id(job_id)

Encodes changing of job_id parameter.

Parameters:job_id (int) –
Returns:bytes encoded message
encode_offset(partition_id, offset)

Encodes current spider offset in spider feed.

Parameters:
  • partition_id (int) –
  • offset (int) –
Returns:

bytes encoded message

class frontera.core.codec.BaseDecoder
decode(buffer)

Decodes the message.

Parameters:buffer (bytes) – encoded message
Returns:tuple of message type and related objects
decode_request(buffer)

Decodes Request objects.

Parameters:buffer (bytes) – serialized string
Returns:object Request

Available codecs

MsgPack

A MsgPack codec for Frontera. Implemented using native msgpack-python library.

Module: frontera.contrib.backends.remote.codecs.msgpack

JSON

A JSON codec for Frontera. Implemented using native json library.

Module: frontera.contrib.backends.remote.codecs.json