Initiate Collection & Delivery
When writing a scraper code on the IDE, the system auto-saves the scraper as a draft to the development environment. From inside the IDE, you can run one page at a time to sample how your scraper will behave. To get a full production run, you need to save scraper to production by clicking the ‘Save to production’ button at the top right corner of the IDE screen. All scrapers will appear under the My scrapers tab in the control panel. Any inactive scraper will be shown in a faded state.
Initiate scraper
To start collecting the data, choose one of three options:
You can start a data collection through API without accessing the Bright Data control panel : Getting started with API documentation
Before initiating an API request, please create an API token. To create an API token, go to:
Dashboard side menu settings > account settings > API tokens
- Set Up Inputs Manually - provide input manually or through the API request
- Trigger behavior - you can add several requests in parallel that are activated according to the order they’re defined. You can add another job run to the queue and run more than two jobs simultaneously.
- Preview of the API Request - Bright Data provides you with a REST API call to initiate the scraper. Please select the “Linux Bash” viewer for CURL commands. As soon as you send the request, you will receive a job id.
You will receive the data according to the delivery preferences defined earlier.
Delivery Options
You can set your delivery preferences for the dataset. To do that simply click on the scraper row from the ‘My scrapers’ tab and then click on ‘Delivery preferences’
Output schema
Schema defines the data point structure and how the data will be organized. You can change the schema structure and modify the data points to suit your needs, re-order, set default values, and add additional data to your output configuration. You can add new field names by going into the advanced settings and editing the code.
| Input / Output schema | choose the tab you’d like to configure |
| Custom validation | validate the schema |
| Parsed data | data points collected by the scraper |
| Add new field | if you need additional data point, you can add fields and define field name and type |
| Additional data | additional information you can add to the schema (timestamp, screenshot, etc.) |