## About Medusa
Medusa is a powerful open-source tool for efficient parallel crawling and scraping of websites. It provides developers with a comprehensive solution for gathering data from websites in a structured manner, making it suitable for a range of use cases, including data analysis, research, and automated data entry.
### Features
#### 1. Simple and Easy-to-Use
Medusa is designed to be user-friendly, even for those new to web scraping. With its intuitive interface and clear documentation, you’ll be up and running in no time.
#### 2. High Performance
Medusa leverages concurrent and parallel processing to scrape multiple pages simultaneously, optimizing the speed and efficiency of your web scraping tasks.
#### 3. Versatile Data Extraction
Extracting data from websites is made easy with Medusa’s robust data extraction features. It supports various selectors, including CSS selectors, XPath queries, and Regular Expressions, allowing you to precisely target the desired elements.
#### 4. Handling Dynamic Content
With Medusa’s support for dynamic content scraping, you can effortlessly extract data from websites that heavily rely on JavaScript or AJAX for loading content.
#### 5. Proxy Support
Medusa seamlessly integrates with proxy servers, enabling you to scrape websites anonymously and bypass IP-based restrictions.
#### 6. Extensible and Customizable
Medusa offers a flexible framework that allows developers to extend and customize its functionality according to their specific needs by utilizing plugins and extensions.
### Installation
To get started with Medusa, follow these simple steps:
1. Install Medusa via [Composer](https://getcomposer.org/):
“`shell
composer require medusa/crawler
“`
2. Include the Composer autoloader in your PHP files:
“`php
require ‘vendor/autoload.php’;
“`
3. You’re all set to use Medusa in your project!
### Basic Usage
Once you have Medusa installed, you can start using it for web scraping. Here’s an example of how to scrape a website using Medusa:
“`php
use Medusa\Crawler\Crawler;
use Medusa\Scraper\Scraper;
use Medusa\Extractor\Extractor;
// Create a new instance of the crawler.
$crawler = new Crawler();
// Set up a new scraper.
$scraper = new Scraper($crawler);
// Set the target URL.
$scraper->setUrl(‘https://example.com’);
// Set the CSS selector to extract data from.
$scraper->setSelector(‘.my-class’);
// Extract the desired data.
$data = $scraper->scrape();
// Print the extracted data.
print_r($data);
“`
### Documentation
For detailed documentation, including advanced usage, configuration options, and examples, visit the [official Medusa documentation](https://medusa-docs.com).
### Support and Community
If you have any questions, issues, or suggestions related to Medusa, feel free to join our friendly community:
– **Discord**: Join the conversation on [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/medusascraper).
– **GitHub**: Report issues or contribute on [GitHub](https://github.com/medusa-project/crawler/issues).
### License
Medusa is released under the MIT license. See the [license file](https://github.com/medusa-project/crawler/blob/main/LICENSE) for more information.