Question 1

How do I crawl a website that requires login with Spidr?

Accepted Answer

Spidr supports HTTP Basic Auth via configuration, but for complex logins like form-based or session cookies, you'll need to manually handle authentication in callbacks or integrate with other Ruby libraries, as it doesn't provide built-in form submission.

Question 2

Can Spidr handle JavaScript-heavy websites?

Accepted Answer

No, Spidr cannot execute JavaScript; it only parses static HTML with Nokogiri, so it's unsuitable for single-page applications or sites where content loads dynamically via client-side scripts.

Question 3

Spidr vs Scrapy for web crawling: which should I use?

Accepted Answer

Choose Spidr if you're a Ruby developer needing fine-grained control and simplicity in a Ruby environment. Scrapy (Python) is better for large-scale, distributed crawls with built-in pipelines and broader ecosystem support.

Question 4

How to extract specific data from pages using Spidr?

Accepted Answer

Use the every_page callback with the page object and Nokogiri's search method, as shown in the example for extracting meta tags or titles, allowing you to parse HTML/XML content directly.

Question 5

Is Spidr good for crawling thousands of pages?

Accepted Answer

It can handle large sites, but its single-threaded nature may slow down performance; for efficiency, consider implementing custom throttling or using it for moderate-scale projects where speed isn't critical.

Question 6

How to make Spidr respect crawl delays or avoid overloading servers?

Accepted Answer

The README doesn't mention built-in rate limiting; you'd need to implement delays manually in callbacks or use external tools, as Spidr focuses on flexibility rather than out-of-the-box politeness features.

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