Web Scraping With Laravel Language
Lavarvel language is a PHP framework that lets website developers and others efficiently pull data from websites and web applications. By using the features built into Laravel, along with its robust ecosystem, it’s possible to tackle various tasks. That includes using packages like Goutte, Symfony, DomCrawler, or Laravel Dusk to completely automate all of your data extraction projects.
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What Is Laravel?
Before we get started on using Laravel language, let’s introduce what it is and what it does. Laravel is a web application framework. It is designed with expressive, elegant syntax. What makes it beneficial to web scraping is that there are robust libraries ready-made to provide you with the guidance and support you need to create a web scraper that operates just as you need to.
As a language, Laravel allows you to build a full-stack application using PHP language. If you enjoy building in JavaScript, you may benefit from the use of Laravel as well.
What is Laravel used for? As a free, open-source PHP framework, it provides you with the tools and resources you need to create PHP web applications that are modern and seamless. It has numerous built-in features that make it sought after, such as Artisan command-line interface (CLI), model view controller (MVC) architecture, and native authentication. This helps to make it super easy to work with, and it’s versatile enough to use for a variety of purposes.
Traditionally, the best way to use Laravel is to create a web app or website. You can use it to create an online store or build a portfolio with it. You can also use Laravel language for web scraping, a process that allows you to capture information from other websites to use for research, monitoring, or other decision-making activities.
How to Use Laravel for Web Scraping
Laravel is an ideal platform for web scraping. That’s because it is a well-rounded and robust PHP framework. It has an expressive syntax that allows you to create an API to scrape information from the web with ease. What makes it so beneficial for this specific task is that it has a number of excellent libraries, which provide you with the framework to build code quickly for various activities and tasks you need. This makes it easier for you to pull data from the URLs you want to scrape. If you have ever performed web scraping in PHP, you already know some of the benefits this process will offer you.
Laravel has numerous built-in features to make this possible, including Goutte, Symfony DomCrawler, and Laravel Dusk, which works to automate the data extraction tasks needed.
Ultimately, this creates a fluent and clean API that will:
- Send HTTP requests
- Parse HTML content
- Interact with dynamic websites to get beyond anti-block technology
It also offers tools like task scheduling and job queuing, which help to automate much of the process and make web scraping easier to do, especially when you have a large amount of data you need to extract. It’s also excellent for its ability to store the scraped data within a database or, if you choose, export it to various other formats to fit your application needs. Keep in mind that this is helpful for those engaging in legal ethical web scraping.
It also offers other benefits:
- It is easy to scale up as your projects become more complex and time-consuming.
- You can easily integrate Laravel language with other tools you may already be using.
- The support from the community is also excellent. There’s a lot of valuable information out there and a growing community of users.
- The MVC architecture is logical and well-organized.
For all of these reasons, Laravel web application development makes sense, including for web scraping activities.
Getting Started with the Best Laravel Libraries for Web Scraping
To help you get started with this process, we have broken down the best libraries for Laravel download – you will want to download and use these specific libraries for most of your web scraping tasks.
BrowserKit: This library is a component of the Symfony framework. It will simulate the API of a web browser. The benefit here is that it will work with HTML documents easily. To use it, you will need the DomCrawler library. That component will then navigate and scrape the HTML documents obtained. What makes this specific component beneficial is that it will do a great job of extracting data from static pages. That means it handles the least complex pages.
HttpClient: You will use this library to send HTTP requests. It is also a part of the Symfony framework. It works very easily alongside BrowserKit to gather data as a part of the web scraping process.
Guzzle: Another helpful library is Guzzle, which is an HTTP client that will send web requests to servers. It will also process the responses very quickly. You will find this an important part of your web scraping activities because it can retrieve HTML documents that are associated with web pages.
Panther: Finally, you need Panther, a tool that allows you to access a headless browser that is ideal for more complex web scraping processes. It works well because it interacts with dynamic sites – those that require human input or interactions. These sites typically require the use of JavaScript applications to render or for interaction.
How to Engage in Laravel Development for Web Scraping
Now, let’s break down the process of using the Laravel language for web scraping. Laravel is front-end or back-end accessible. However, to get started with the process we will show you here, you will need to have PHP 8 or higher as well as Composer.
In the next steps, we will show you how to run an old Laravel project or how to build a web scraping API in Laravel.
Let’s say we want to use the Quotes website to capture some quotes to use for our project. So, we will use the Quotes scraping sandbox site to do this. Our goal will be to select the quote HTML element from the URL page, then extract the data from it and return the scraped data in JSON. Sounds like fun? Here is how to make it happen.
Setup your Laravel project: The first thing to do is open the terminal and language of the Composer create command. This will start the Laravel language web scraping application. Enter the following:
composer create-project laravel/laravel laravel-scraper
This creates a blank project folder. Now, we want to use a PHP IDE to fill your needs. Once you have a project in place, you can move on to the next steps.
Initialize your scraping API. The best way to do this is through the Artisan command. Launch it below using the project directory for your new Laravel controller. Follow this command:
php artisan make:controller HelloWorldController
You will then have the ScrapingController.php file in the directory folder you created. It should look like this:
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
class ScrapingController extends Controller
{
//
}
From here, you will need to add the following ScrapeQuotes() method to your ScrapingController file. Add this command:
public function scrapeQuotes(): JsonResponse
{
// scraping logic…
return response()->json(‘Hello, World!’);
}
If you have done everything right so far, the end result will be a “Hello, World!” JSON message. Now, let’s add more Laravel language logic to it to achieve your goals.
Add the following import next:
use Illuminate\Http\JsonResponse;
Then, associate the ScrapeQuotes () method with a dedicated endpoint. To do this, you need to add additional lines to the routes/api.php. Here is an example of what to add:
use App\Http\Controllers\ScrapingController;
Route::get(‘/v1/scraping/scrape-quotes’, [ScrapingController::class, ‘scrapeQuotes’]);
This should work as desired at this point. Laravel language APIs are found under the /api path. To complete the API endpoint, your code should look like this:
/api/v1/scraping/scrape-quotes
How did you do? If you’re not sure, go back and double-check some of the code details. You can also language your application at this point to see how well you did. To do that, enter the following:
use App\Http\Controllers\ScrapingController;
Route::get(‘/v1/scraping/scrape-quotes’, [ScrapingController::class, ‘scrapeQuotes’]);]
Then, use cURL to a GET request to the /api/v1/scraping/scrape-quotes endpoint. To do that, use the following:
curl -X GET ‘http://localhost:8000/api/v1/scraping/scrape-quotes’
What’s your response? It should be “Hello, World!”
This process this far allows you to get a feel for how to use Laravel language to achieve your goals. You can then add in the libraries you want to use to obtain the details you desire from the websites you want to scrape. Remember, our example uses the Quotes website, but you can create one that fits any specific needs you desire.
Getting Started with Scraping Robot
Now that you have an idea of how to use Laravel language as a web scraping tool, it’s time to consider what Scraping Robot can offer to you. Contact us now with all of your questions, or start using our web scraping API now.
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