Economics Calendar Scraper

An Apify Actor that scrapes economic calendar data using PuppeteerCrawler. It's designed for websites requiring JavaScript execution and includes production-ready features like proxy rotation and structured data storage.

Overview

This Actor uses Crawlee's PuppeteerCrawler to scrape economic calendars from websites that load content dynamically with JavaScript. It handles parallel crawling, IP blocking avoidance through proxy rotation, and outputs structured data to a dataset.

Key Features

• Puppeteer Crawler: Uses headless Chrome to scrape JavaScript-rendered pages
• Configurable Proxy: Built-in proxy rotation to avoid IP blocking (Apify Proxy or custom proxies)
• Input Schema: Validated configuration for start URLs and parameters
• Dataset Storage: Structured output with consistent data attributes
• Custom Routing: Handler-based system for different page types

How to Use

Basic Setup

1. Configure Input: Provide start URLs in INPUT.json for the economic calendar sites
2. Set Proxy: The Actor automatically creates proxy configuration using Actor.createProxyConfiguration()
3. Define Handlers: Customize page handling in routes.js:
   javascript router.addHandler('calendar', async ({ request, page, log }) => { // Extract economic event data here await Dataset.pushData({ event: eventName, date: eventDate, impact: eventImpact, url: request.loadedUrl }); });
4. Run Crawler: The crawler processes URLs with crawler.run(startUrls)

Handler Structure

• Default handler processes unmatched URLs
• Custom handlers target specific page types (e.g., 'detail', 'listing')
• Each handler receives { request, page, log } objects for page interaction

Input/Output

Input (INPUT.json)

{
  "startUrls": ["https://example-calendar.com/events"],
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

Output (Dataset)

Structured economic event data including:
- Event name and description
- Date/time and currency
- Expected impact level
- Actual vs. forecast values
- Source URL and timestamp

Resources

• Crawlee + Apify Platform guide
• Puppeteer Crawler documentation
• Examples
• Proxy configuration guide
• Apify SDK documentation