Parallel asynchronous GET requests with asyncio

The 3 types of async statement in Python 3.5+ to get to know here are

• async with (asynchronous context manager)
• async for (asynchronous generator)
• (asynchronous generators)

via Łukasz Langa

(also will see async def asynchronous function)

Another via RealPython uses aiohttp

The high-level program structure will look like this:

• Read a sequence of URLs from a local file, urls.txt.

• Send GET requests for the URLs and decode the resulting content. If this fails, stop there for a URL.

• Search for the URLs within href tags in the HTML of the responses.

• Write the results to foundurls.txt.

Do all of the above as asynchronously and concurrently as possible. (Use aiohttp for the requests, and aiofiles for the file-appends. These are two primary examples of IO that are well-suited for the async IO model.)

Code example

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# areq.py

"""Asynchronously get links embedded in multiple pages' HMTL."""

import asyncio
import logging
import re
import sys
from typing import IO
import urllib.error
import urllib.parse

import aiofiles
import aiohttp
from aiohttp import ClientSession

logging.basicConfig(
    format="%(asctime)s %(levelname)s:%(name)s: %(message)s",
    level=logging.DEBUG,
    datefmt="%H:%M:%S",
    stream=sys.stderr,
)
logger = logging.getLogger("areq")
logging.getLogger("chardet.charsetprober").disabled = True

HREF_RE = re.compile(r'href="(.*?)"')

async def fetch_html(url: str, session: ClientSession, **kwargs) -> str:
    """GET request wrapper to fetch page HTML.

    kwargs are passed to `session.request()`.
    """

    resp = await session.request(method="GET", url=url, **kwargs)
    resp.raise_for_status()
    logger.info("Got response [%s] for URL: %s", resp.status, url)
    html = await resp.text()
    return html

async def parse(url: str, session: ClientSession, **kwargs) -> set:
    """Find HREFs in the HTML of `url`."""
    found = set()
    try:
        html = await fetch_html(url=url, session=session, **kwargs)
    except (
        aiohttp.ClientError,
        aiohttp.http_exceptions.HttpProcessingError,
    ) as e:
        logger.error(
            "aiohttp exception for %s [%s]: %s",
            url,
            getattr(e, "status", None),
            getattr(e, "message", None),
        )
        return found
    except Exception as e:
        logger.exception(
            "Non-aiohttp exception occured:  %s", getattr(e, "__dict__", {})
        )
        return found
    else:
        for link in HREF_RE.findall(html):
            try:
                abslink = urllib.parse.urljoin(url, link)
            except (urllib.error.URLError, ValueError):
                logger.exception("Error parsing URL: %s", link)
                pass
            else:
                found.add(abslink)
        logger.info("Found %d links for %s", len(found), url)
        return found

async def write_one(file: IO, url: str, **kwargs) -> None:
    """Write the found HREFs from `url` to `file`."""
    res = await parse(url=url, **kwargs)
    if not res:
        return None
    async with aiofiles.open(file, "a") as f:
        for p in res:
            await f.write(f"{url}\t{p}\n")
        logger.info("Wrote results for source URL: %s", url)

async def bulk_crawl_and_write(file: IO, urls: set, **kwargs) -> None:
    """Crawl & write concurrently to `file` for multiple `urls`."""
    async with ClientSession() as session:
        tasks = []
        for url in urls:
            tasks.append(
                write_one(file=file, url=url, session=session, **kwargs)
            )
        await asyncio.gather(*tasks)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import pathlib
    import sys

    assert sys.version_info >= (3, 7), "Script requires Python 3.7+."
    here = pathlib.Path(__file__).parent

    with open(here.joinpath("urls.txt")) as infile:
        urls = set(map(str.strip, infile))

    outpath = here.joinpath("foundurls.txt")
    with open(outpath, "w") as outfile:
        outfile.write("source_url\tparsed_url\n")

    asyncio.run(bulk_crawl_and_write(file=outpath, urls=urls))

The call to run at the end means you don’t have to handle the opening and closing of the event loop itself, it’s handled for you (as the Python docs for asyncio recommend)

Application developers should typically use the high-level asyncio functions, such as asyncio.run(), and should rarely need to reference the loop object or call its methods. This section is intended mostly for authors of lower-level code, libraries, and frameworks, who need finer control over the event loop behavior.