Backends

Frontier Backend is where the crawling logic/policies lies, essentially a brain of your crawler. Queue, Metadata and States are classes where all low level code is meant to be placed, and Backend opposite, operates on a higher levels. Frontera is bundled with database and in-memory implementations of Queue, Metadata and States which can be combined in your custom backends or used standalone by directly instantiating FrontierManager and Backend.

Backend methods are called by the FrontierManager after Middleware, using hooks for Request and Response processing according to frontier data flow.

Unlike Middleware, that can have many different instances activated, only one Backend can be used per frontier.

Activating a backend

To activate the frontier backend component, set it through the BACKEND setting.

Here’s an example:

BACKEND = 'frontera.contrib.backends.memory.FIFO'

Keep in mind that some backends may need to be additionally configured through a particular setting. See backends documentation for more info.

Writing your own backend

Each backend component is a single Python class inherited from Backend or DistributedBackend and using one or all of Queue, Metadata and States.

FrontierManager will communicate with active backend through the methods described below.

class frontera.core.components.Backend

Interface definition for frontier backend.

Methods

frontier_start()

Called when the frontier starts, see starting/stopping the frontier.

Returns:None.
frontier_stop()

Called when the frontier stops, see starting/stopping the frontier.

Returns:None.
finished()

Quick check if crawling is finished. Called pretty often, please make sure calls are lightweight.

Returns:boolean
add_seeds(seeds)

This method is called when new seeds are added to the frontier.

Parameters:seeds (list) – A list of Request objects.
Returns:None.
page_crawled(response, links)

This method is called each time a page has been crawled.

Parameters:
  • response (object) – The Response object for the crawled page.
  • links (list) – A list of Request objects generated from the links extracted for the crawled page.
Returns:

None.

request_error(page, error)

This method is called each time an error occurs when crawling a page

Parameters:
  • request (object) – The crawled with error Request object.
  • error (string) – A string identifier for the error.
Returns:

None.

get_next_requests(max_n_requests, **kwargs)

Returns a list of next requests to be crawled.

Parameters:
  • max_next_requests (int) – Maximum number of requests to be returned by this method.
  • kwargs (dict) – A parameters from downloader component.
Returns:

list of Request objects.

Class Methods

from_manager(manager)

Class method called from FrontierManager passing the manager itself.

Example of usage:

def from_manager(cls, manager):
    return cls(settings=manager.settings)

Properties

queue
Returns:associated Queue object
states
Returns:associated States object
metadata
Returns:associated Metadata object
class frontera.core.components.DistributedBackend

Interface definition for distributed frontier backend. Implies using in strategy worker and DB worker.

Inherits all methods of Backend, and has two more class methods, which are called during strategy and db worker instantiation.

classmethod DistributedBackend.strategy_worker(manager)
classmethod DistributedBackend.db_worker(manager)

Backend should communicate with low-level storage by means of these classes:

Metadata

class frontera.core.components.Metadata

Interface definition for a frontier metadata class. This class is responsible for storing documents metadata, including content and optimized for write-only data flow.

Methods

add_seeds(seeds)

This method is called when new seeds are added to the frontier.

Parameters:seeds (list) – A list of Request objects.
request_error(page, error)

This method is called each time an error occurs when crawling a page

Parameters:
  • request (object) – The crawled with error Request object.
  • error (string) – A string identifier for the error.
page_crawled(response, links)

This method is called each time a page has been crawled.

Parameters:
  • response (object) – The Response object for the crawled page.
  • links (list) – A list of Request objects generated from the links extracted for the crawled page.

Known implementations are: MemoryMetadata and sqlalchemy.components.Metadata.

Queue

class frontera.core.components.Queue

Interface definition for a frontier queue class. The queue has priorities and partitions.

Methods

get_next_requests(max_n_requests, partition_id, **kwargs)

Returns a list of next requests to be crawled, and excludes them from internal storage.

Parameters:
  • max_next_requests (int) – Maximum number of requests to be returned by this method.
  • kwargs (dict) – A parameters from downloader component.
Returns:

list of Request objects.

schedule(batch)

Schedules a new documents for download from batch, and updates score in metadata.

Parameters:batch – list of tuples(fingerprint, score, request, schedule), if schedule is True, then document needs to be scheduled for download, False - only update score in metadata.
count()

Returns count of documents in the queue.

Returns:int

Known implementations are: MemoryQueue and sqlalchemy.components.Queue.

States

class frontera.core.components.States

Interface definition for a document states management class. This class is responsible for providing actual documents state, and persist the state changes in batch-oriented manner.

Methods

update_cache(objs)

Reads states from meta[‘state’] field of request in objs and stores states in internal cache.

Parameters:objs – list or tuple of Request objects.
set_states(objs)

Sets meta[‘state’] field from cache for every request in objs.

Parameters:objs – list or tuple of Request objects.
flush(force_clear)

Flushes internal cache to storage.

Parameters:force_clear – boolean, True - signals to clear cache after flush
fetch(fingerprints)

Get states from the persistent storage to internal cache.

Parameters:fingerprints – list document fingerprints, which state to read

Known implementations are: MemoryStates and sqlalchemy.components.States.

Built-in backend reference

This article describes all backend components that come bundled with Frontera.

To know the default activated Backend check the BACKEND setting.

Basic algorithms

Some of the built-in Backend objects implement basic algorithms as as FIFO/LIFO or DFS/BFS for page visit ordering.

Differences between them will be on storage engine used. For instance, memory.FIFO and sqlalchemy.FIFO will use the same logic but with different storage engines.

All these backend variations are using the same CommonBackend class implementing one-time visit crawling policy with priority queue.

class frontera.contrib.backends.CommonBackend

A simpliest possible backend, performing one-time crawl: if page was crawled once, it will not be crawled again.

Memory backends

This set of Backend objects will use an heapq module as queue and native dictionaries as storage for basic algorithms.

class frontera.contrib.backends.memory.BASE

Base class for in-memory Backend objects.

class frontera.contrib.backends.memory.FIFO

In-memory Backend implementation of FIFO algorithm.

class frontera.contrib.backends.memory.LIFO

In-memory Backend implementation of LIFO algorithm.

class frontera.contrib.backends.memory.BFS

In-memory Backend implementation of BFS algorithm.

class frontera.contrib.backends.memory.DFS

In-memory Backend implementation of DFS algorithm.

class frontera.contrib.backends.memory.RANDOM

In-memory Backend implementation of a random selection algorithm.

SQLAlchemy backends

This set of Backend objects will use SQLAlchemy as storage for basic algorithms.

By default it uses an in-memory SQLite database as a storage engine, but any databases supported by SQLAlchemy can be used.

If you need to use your own declarative sqlalchemy models, you can do it by using the SQLALCHEMYBACKEND_MODELS setting.

This setting uses a dictionary where key represents the name of the model to define and value the model to use.

For a complete list of all settings used for SQLAlchemy backends check the settings section.

class frontera.contrib.backends.sqlalchemy.BASE

Base class for SQLAlchemy Backend objects.

class frontera.contrib.backends.sqlalchemy.FIFO

SQLAlchemy Backend implementation of FIFO algorithm.

class frontera.contrib.backends.sqlalchemy.LIFO

SQLAlchemy Backend implementation of LIFO algorithm.

class frontera.contrib.backends.sqlalchemy.BFS

SQLAlchemy Backend implementation of BFS algorithm.

class frontera.contrib.backends.sqlalchemy.DFS

SQLAlchemy Backend implementation of DFS algorithm.

class frontera.contrib.backends.sqlalchemy.RANDOM

SQLAlchemy Backend implementation of a random selection algorithm.

Revisiting backend

Based on custom SQLAlchemy backend, and queue. Crawling starts with seeds. After seeds are crawled, every new document will be scheduled for immediate crawling. On fetching every new document will be scheduled for recrawling after fixed interval set by SQLALCHEMYBACKEND_REVISIT_INTERVAL.

Current implementation of revisiting backend has no prioritization. During long term runs spider could go idle, because there are no documents available for crawling, but there are documents waiting for their scheduled revisit time.

class frontera.contrib.backends.sqlalchemy.revisiting.Backend

Base class for SQLAlchemy Backend implementation of revisiting back-end.

HBase backend

class frontera.contrib.backends.hbase.HBaseBackend(manager)

Is more suitable for large scale web crawlers. Settings reference can be found here HBase backend. Consider tunning a block cache to fit states within one block for average size website. To achieve this it’s recommended to use hostname_local_fingerprint

to achieve documents closeness within the same host. This function can be selected with URL_FINGERPRINT_FUNCTION setting.