Web Scraping is used to collect data from websites, when there is no other means of data collection — For eg. API or feeds. Any publicly available data in websites can be collected and further used for research or analytics purposes.
In this article, we will create a simple Laravel application as shown in the picture above . It extracts data from books.toscrape.com when Scrape Books button is pressed. Then it stores data in a database and display on the homepage. books.toscrape.com is a demo website, that we can use for scraping books information.
The goal of this article is to help readers create a simple application using Laravel framework. At the end of this article, I will add link to github repo, if in case you want to see the complete code.
Let’s get started with local Laravel setup.
Step 1: Installing Dependencies
Before starting, make sure you have PHP and Composer are installed in your local machine. You can make sure both are setup by going to terminal or command line and typing following:
$> php -v
PHP 8.3.7 (cli) (built: May 9 2024 03:25:02) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.3.7, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies$> composer -v
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