In this tutorial, we will learn how to crawl a password protected website online by passing the username, password in agent configuration for authentication programmatically and then crawl the behind login webpages.

1. Web Scraping Software
2. Is Web Scraping Legal
3. Web Scraping Service
4. Good Sites To Practice Web Scraping
5. Best Web Scraping Tools

• A website that lists quotes from famous people. It has many endpoints showing the quotes in many different ways, each of them including new scraping challenges for you, as described below. It has many endpoints showing the quotes in many different ways, each of them including new scraping challenges for you, as described below.
• E-commerce site. E-commerce site with multiple categories, subcategories. All items are loaded in one page. E-commerce site with pagination links. E-commerce site with popup links. E-commerce site with AJAX pagination links. E-commerce site with 'Load more' buttons.

Web Scraping Software

This is a demo website for web scraping purposes. Prices and ratings here were randomly assigned and have no real meaning. Web scraping is the practice of using a computer, rather than a person to extract data from a website, so on face value it's hard to see how the two would be treated different by the law. That being said, sales and marketing professionals continue to worry not just about running into legal issues, but also damaging their reputation when it. Web Scraping: Introduction, Applications and Best Practices. Web scraping typically extracts large amounts of data from websites for a variety of uses such as price monitoring, enriching machine learning models, financial data aggregation, monitoring consumer sentiment, news tracking, etc. Browsers show data from a website.

To crawl a website with login, first of all we must get authenticated our scraping agent with Username and Password. And then, we can scrape the internal pages as we do with public websites. Scraping the web with Agenty, hosted app is pretty easy and quick to setup using the extension and then we can enter the credentials by editing the scraper in agent editor. This tutorial shows, how to get data from a password protected website after login successfully and then schedule the scraper, to scrape website with login automatically on scheduled time.

There are 2 types of authentications:

• Form Authentication
• Http Authentication (also called as Basic or Network Authentication)

The Form-based authentication is most widely used website protection technique, where the websites display a HTML web form to fill in the username, password and click on submit button in order to login and access the secure pages or service. A usual password protected website scraping with form-authentication workflow looks like below and we need to perform all steps one by one to get data from website that requires a login.

1. Navigate to login page.
2. Enter the Username in input filed
3. Enter the Password in input field
4. Click on the Login button
5. Start scraping internal pages.

Commands

The form-authentication engine in scraping agent has the following commands to interact with a login page using CSS Selectors as the target of any element, this will allow us to complete the initial 1-4 login steps prior to start scraping internal pages.

Navigate

To navigate a particular webpage, for example the login page for authentication

Required Parameters:

1. Value: A valid URL to navigate.

Type

To type some text in a text box. For example, username or password to the text box

Required Parameters:

1. Target: A valid CSS selector of text box.
2. Value: Value to enter in the text box.

Click

To click on a button or a hyper-link

Required Parameters:

1. Target: A valid CSS selector of button/link needs to be clicked

Wait

To wait (n) seconds before firing the next event

Required Parameters:

1. Value: Seconds(n) to wait

Select

Select an item from dropdown list

Required Parameters:

1. Target: A valid CSS selector of dropdown box.
2. Value: Value needs to be selected.

Clear

To clear a text box

Required Parameters:

1. Target: A valid CSS selector of text box, drop down to clear.

JavaScript

To inject a JavaScript function

Required Parameters:

1. Value: A valid JavaScript function

Submit

To submit a form (or to press the Enter key)

How to crawl a website with login

Follow these steps to scrape data behind a login :

1. Click on Edit tab
2. Go to Login to website section and Enable login as in the screenshot below.

Now go to website you want to login, and check the web page source to analyse the login form. For this tutorial, I’m going to use the cloud.agenty.com itself to demonstrate, so these will the steps I will add to my agent to login successfully.

• Navigate to https://cloud.agenty.com/
• Enter user name on text box with CSS selector #ContentPlaceHolder1_LoginPanel_UserName
• Enter password on text box with CSS selector #ContentPlaceHolder1_LoginPanel_Password
• Click on the Sign In button with CSS selector #ContentPlaceHolder1_LoginPanel_LoginButton

The target CSS selector can be written with name, class or id. For example, to click on the “Sign In” button all these selectors are valid.

• #ContentPlaceHolder1_LoginPanel_Password
• .StandardButton
• input[type='submit']

Is Web Scraping Legal

Once the login configuration part has been completed, save the scraping agent, and scroll up to main agent page to start and test your agent. It’s always a best practice to test with few URLs ensure that the agent is login successfully before running a large job. For example, I entered some internal URLs in input which was accessible after login only, and then started the scraping job.

Agenty recommends to run a test job for few URLs, when the agent configuration has been changed. As that will allow to analyse the result to ensure everything is working as expected, instead starting the agent for big list of URLs.

Then click on the “Start” button to start the web scraping agent job.

Logs

Result

It will take few seconds to initialize and login, then the web scraping agent will start scraping internal pages, and we can see the progress, logs and the final result as per your fields selection in the result output table.

HTTP Authentication

The HTTP or basic authentication is a simple challenge which a web server can request authentication information (typically a UserID and Password) from a client. These websites doesn’t have HTML web form to type credentials or select using CSS selectors and then click on submit button. Instead the browser open a popup dialog (as in screenshot below) asking for credentials when you visit the secured pages and then the browser use those credentials to convert into a base64 string and send the Authorization header to server to attempt the login.

In order to crawl the basic-authentication protected websites, we need to use the HTTP-authentication as the type of login in scraping agent and then supply the credentials with these commands:

1. Edit the scraping agent by clicking on “Edit” tab
2. Go to Login to website section
3. Enable the Login to website feature and select the Authentication type as “HTTP-authentication”
4. Add the Navigate command to go to the login page URL.
5. Add the Type command with target as username and value as your actual username to login.
6. Add the Type command with target as password and value as your actual password to login.
7. Save the scraping agent and re-run.
8. See the output or logs to ensure the agent is able to login successfully.

The scraping agent automatically logout to the domain after 20 minutes of in-activity on same domain or if the scraping jobs is completed prior to that. So, if you are using throttling feature to delay in sequential requests, be sure there is no gap of more than 20 minutes.

Basic Authentication with FORM

We can also get our agent session authenticated by sending a Navigate request with username and password in the URL itself. Just make a first request using form authentication or Form submit feature with URL format below:

For example :

Notes

• When crawling password protected websites, we recommend to spent some time in analysis first, and try to use the specific login page of website instead dialog box or popup login when possible. You may find that by logging in and then logging out, most of the website auto-redirect users on specific login page when logged out.
• Add a 5-10 seconds of wait after clicking on “Login” button to give enough time to website for auto redirect to main or home page.
• If the website requires AJAX, JavaScript? Go to Engine section and then enable the JavaScript with Default engine selected.
  Recommendation: Use the FastBrowser engine, if the target website doesn’t require JavaScript or images to be loaded for login and also to render internal pages you are crawling.

Wants to extract data behind login? Let the Agenty team setup, execute and maintain your data scraping project - Request a quote

There are many free web scraping tools. However, not all web scraping software is for non-programmers. The lists below are the best web scraping tools without coding skills at a low cost. The freeware listed below is easy to pick up and would satisfy most scraping needs with a reasonable amount of data requirement.

Table of content

Web Scraping Service

Web Scraper Client

1. Octoparse

Octoparse is a robust web scraping tool which also provides web scraping service for business owners and Enterprise. As it can be installed on both Windows and Mac OS, users can scrape data with apple devices.Web data extraction includes but not limited to social media, e-commerce, marketing, real estate listing and many others. Unlike other web scrapers that only scrape content with simple HTML structure, Octoparse can handle both static and dynamic websites with AJAX, JavaScript, cookies and etc. You can create a scraping task to extract data from a complex website such as a site that requires login and pagination. Octoparse can even deal with information that is not showing on the websites by parsing the source code. As a result, you can achieve automatic inventories tracking, price monitoring and leads generating within fingertips.

Good Sites To Practice Web Scraping

Octoparse has the Task Template Mode and Advanced Mode for users with both basic and advanced scraping skills.

• A user with basic scraping skills will take a smart move by using this brand-new feature that allows him/her to turn web pages into some structured data instantly. The Task Template Mode only takes about 6.5 seconds to pull down the data behind one page and allows you to download the data to Excel.

• The Advanced mode has more flexibility comparing the other mode. This allows users to configure and edit the workflow with more options. Advance mode is used for scraping more complex websites with a massive amount of data. With its industry-leading data fields auto-detectionfeature, Octoparse also allows you to build a crawler with ease. If you are not satisfied with the auto-generated data fields, you can always customize the scraping task to let itscrape the data for you.The cloud services enable to bulk extract huge amounts of data within a short time frame since multiple cloud servers concurrently run one task. Besides that, thecloud servicewill allow you to store and retrieve the data at any time.

2. ParseHub

Parsehub is a great web scraper that supports collecting data from websites that use AJAX technologies, JavaScript, cookies and etc. Parsehub leverages machine learning technology which is able to read, analyze and transform web documents into relevant data.

The desktop application of Parsehub supports systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, or you can use the browser extension to achieve an instant scraping. It is not fully free, but you still can set up to five scraping tasks for free. The paid subscription plan allows you to set up at least 20 private projects. There are plenty of tutorials for at Parsehub and you can get more information from the homepage.

3. Import.io

Import.io is a SaaS web data integration software. It provides a visual environment for end-users to design and customize the workflows for harvesting data. It also allows you to capture photos and PDFs into a feasible format. Besides, it covers the entire web extraction lifecycle from data extraction to analysis within one platform. And you can easily integrate into other systems as well.

4. Outwit hub

Outwit hub is a Firefox extension, and it can be easily downloaded from the Firefox add-ons store. Once installed and activated, you can scrape the content from websites instantly. It has an outstanding 'Fast Scrape' features, which quickly scrapes data from a list of URLs that you feed in. Extracting data from sites using Outwit hub doesn’t demand programming skills. The scraping process is fairly easy to pick up. You can refer to our guide on using Outwit hub to get started with web scraping using the tool. It is a good alternative web scraping tool if you need to extract a light amount of information from the websites instantly.

Web Scraping Plugins/Extension

1. Data Scraper (Chrome)

Data Scraper can scrape data from tables and listing type data from a single web page. Its free plan should satisfy most simple scraping with a light amount of data. The paid plan has more features such as API and many anonymous IP proxies. You can fetch a large volume of data in real-time faster. You can scrape up to 500 pages per month, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.

2. Web scraper

Web scraper has a chrome extension and cloud extension. For chrome extension, you can create a sitemap (plan) on how a website should be navigated and what data should be scrapped. The cloud extension is can scrape a large volume of data and run multiple scraping tasks concurrently. You can export the data in CSV, or store the data into Couch DB.

3. Scraper (Chrome)

The scraper is another easy-to-use screen web scraper that can easily extract data from an online table, and upload the result to Google Docs.

Just select some text in a table or a list, right-click on the selected text and choose 'Scrape Similar' from the browser menu. Then you will get the data and extract other content by adding new columns using XPath or JQuery. This tool is intended for intermediate to advanced users who know how to write XPath.

Web-based Scraping Application

1. Dexi.io (formerly known as Cloud scrape)

Dexi.io is intended for advanced users who have proficient programming skills. It has three types of robots for you to create a scraping task - Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. It provides various tools that allow you to extract the data more precisely. With its modern feature, you will able to address the details on any websites. For people with no programming skills, you may need to take a while to get used to it before creating a web scraping robot. Check out their homepage to learn more about the knowledge base.

The freeware provides anonymous web proxy servers for web scraping. Extracted data will be hosted on Dexi.io’s servers for two weeks before archived, or you can directly export the extracted data to JSON or CSV files. It offers paid services to meet your needs for getting real-time data.

2. Webhose.io

Webhose.io enables you to get real-time data from scraping online sources from all over the world into various, clean formats. You even can scrape information on the dark web. This web scraper allows you to scrape data in many different languages using multiple filters and export scraped data in XML, JSON, and RSS formats.

The freeware offers a free subscription plan for you to make 1000 HTTP requests per month and paid subscription plans to make more HTTP requests per month to suit your web scraping needs.

Best Web Scraping Tools