# scrapinghub/frontera

A scalable frontier for web crawlers

Repository: https://github.com/scrapinghub/frontera
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/frontera
Language: Python
License: BSD-3-Clause
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2025-06-06T14:41:02+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 34/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 25, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4302, "days_push": 453, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1332, forks 212 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:24.448411+00:00)

## What it is
Frontera is a Python web crawling framework that implements a scalable crawl frontier, storing and prioritizing links extracted by crawlers to decide which pages to visit next. It supports both single-process and distributed operation with pluggable backends (SQLAlchemy, Redis, HBase) and message buses (Kafka, ZeroMQ).

## Use cases
- build a large-scale distributed web crawler
- prioritize which URLs a crawler should fetch next
- run a breadth-first or depth-first crawl strategy at scale
- integrate a crawl frontier with Scrapy spiders
- distribute crawling work across multiple workers via Kafka
- implement a site discovery crawler respecting robots.txt and sitemaps

## When to choose
- you need a battle-tested, scalable frontier for a large online crawler
- you want pluggable backends and message buses for distributed crawling
- you already use Scrapy and need frontier logic
- you need to crawl tens of millions of documents daily

## When to avoid
- you only need a simple one-off scraper without URL prioritization
- you want a turnkey crawler rather than a frontier framework to build on
- you need active feature development - the project is largely in maintenance mode

## Facets
- artifact type: framework
- maturity: maintenance
- function: web-scraping, message-queue, caching, database
- domain: crawlers, web-development, big-data
- platform: python, self-hosted
- tags: crawl-frontier, distributed-crawling, scrapy, kafka, hbase, redis, url-prioritization, search, linux, docker

## Member repositories
- scrapinghub/frontera (main) score 34

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:24.448411+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T04:45:13.839980+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/scrapinghub/frontera (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:24.448411+00:00, sha bfb5df065da9)
  - registry_pypi: https://pypi.org/pypi/frontera/json (fetched 2026-08-29T12:04:22.869726+00:00, sha cedd58ad82f0)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.