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4 min read

Getting Started with Spider API

Contents

Spider API Features

API Built to Scale

Welcome to the fastest web crawler API. We want you to experience the full potential of our platform, which is why we have designed our API to be highly scalable and efficient.

Our platform is designed to effortlessly manage thousands of requests per second, thanks to our elastically scalable system architecture and the open-source Spider project. We deliver consistent latency times ensuring processing for all responses.

For an in-depth understanding of the request parameters supported, we invite you to explore our comprehensive API documentation. At present, we do not provide client-side libraries, as our API has been crafted with simplicity in mind for straightforward usage. However, we are open to expanding our offerings in the future to enhance user convenience.

Dive into our documentation to get started and unleash the full potential of our web crawler today.

API Usage

Getting started with the API is simple and straightforward. After you get your secret key, you can access our instance directly. Or if you prefer, you can use our client SDK libraries for Python and JavaScript. The crawler is highly configurable through the params to fit all needs and use cases when using the API directly or client libraries.

Use Spider in LangChain or LlamaIndex

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Crawling One Page

Most cases you probably just want to crawl one page. Even if you only need one page, our system performs fast enough to lead the race. The most straightforward way to make sure you only crawl a single page is to set the budget limit with a wildcard value or * to 1. You can also pass in the param limit in the JSON body with the limit of pages.

Crawling Multiple Pages

When you crawl multiple pages, the concurrency horsepower of the spider kicks in. You might wonder why and how one request may take (x)ms to come back, and 100 requests take about the same time! That’s because the built-in isolated concurrency allows for crawling thousands to millions of pages in no time. It’s the only current solution that can handle large websites with over 100k pages within a minute or two (sometimes even in a blink or two). By default, we do not add any limits to crawls unless specified.

Optimized Response Format for Large Language Models (LLM) and AI Agents

Get the response in markdown that is clean, easy to parse, and save on token cost when using LLMs.

import requests

json_data = {"return_format": "markdown", "url": "http://www.example.com", "limit": 5}

response = requests.post('https://api.spider.cloud/v1/crawl',
                         headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY'},
                         json=json_data)

print(response.json())

Or if you prefer, you can get the response in raw HTML format or text only.

Planet Scale Crawling

If you plan on processing crawls that have over 200 pages, we recommend streaming the request from the client instead of parsing the entire payload once finished. We have an example of this with Python on the API docs page, also shown below.

import requests, os, json

headers = {
    'Authorization': os.environ["SPIDER_API_KEY"],
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
}

json_data = {"limit": 250, "url": "http://www.example.com"}

response = requests.post('https://api.spider.cloud/v1/crawl',
                         headers=headers,
                         json=json_data,
                         stream=True)

for line in response.iter_lines():
    if line:
        print(json.loads(line))

Automatic Configuration

Spider handles automatic concurrency handling, proxy rotations (if enabled), anti-bot measures, and more.

Get Started with Using the API

  1. Add credits to your account balance. The more credits you have or usage available allows for a higher concurrency limit.
  2. Create an API key.
  3. Enable Auto Refill usage.

Thanks for using Spider! We are excited to see what you build with our API. If you have any questions or need help, please contact us through the feedback form.