FirmwareScraper

The FirmwareScraper is able to scrape firmware from multiple vendor webpages using the scrapy library

Installation

Ubuntu 20.04 and above

Some packages need to be installed using apt-get/apt before installing scrapy

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-pip libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev zlib1g-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev

Scrapy can then be installed using the following command:

pip install scrapy

For more information about the installation process of scrapy, see here.

Use

To use the existing scrapy project, just clone it into a repository of your choice

git clone https://github.com/mellowCS/FirmwareScraper.git

To run a spider, just go into the project's folder and type the following command into the terminal:

TMPDIR=$HOME/tmp scrapy crawl *name of spider e.g. avm* -o *name of file to output metadata e.g. spidername.json*

Dependencies

Selenium

For selenium to be able to render the desired page you need a driver executable (geckodriver, chromedriver etc.) to be in the correct path in the settings.py.

SELENIUM_DRIVER_EXECUTABLE_PATH = '/home/username/driver/geckodriver'

For more information about the installation process of selenium, see here.

To get the supported drivers for selenium see here.

Beautiful Soup

Some spiders use Beautiful Soup to search for attributes in a webpage.

pip install beautifulsoup4

For more information about the installation process of Beautiful Soup, see here.

Developer

All developed spiders and corresponding tests should be contained in the folders

.../FirmwareScraper/firmware/spiders/
.../FirmwareScraper/firmware/tests/

File Download

For the file download, scrapy's file pipline is activated in settings.py. To store the files, a valid path has to be added

ITEM_PIPELINES = {
    'scrapy.pipelines.files.FilesPipeline': 1
}

FILES_STORE = 'valid/path/to/files/'

Additionally, the necessary fields are added to the FirmwareItem class in the items.py

class FirmwareItem(scrapy.Item):
    file_urls = scrapy.Field()
    files = scrapy.Field()

To add files to the pipeline use the following commands in the spider class

for url in ...:
    loader = ItemLoader(item=FirmwareItem(), selector=url)
    loader.add_value('file_urls', url)
    yield loader.load_item()

The scrapy script will then automatically download all the files in the pipeline

Naming Convention

The name of the spider should contain the source in a meaningful way (e.g. When crawling netgear firmware, the spider's name could be netgear.py)

It is not necessary to add the key word 'spider' (e.g. netgear_spider.py) as it is already contained in the spiders folder and it would just inflate the module's name.

stl314159/FirmwareScraper