I wanted to share my recent project: Tadpole. It is a custom DSL built on top of KDL specifically for web scraping and browser automation. I wanted there to be a standardized way of writing scrapers and reusing existing scraper logic. This was my solution.
Why?
Abstraction: Simulating realistic human behavior (bezier curves, easing) through high-level composed actions.
Zero Config: Import and share scraper modules directly via Git, bypass NPM/Registry overhead.
Reusability: Actions and evaluators can be composed through slots to create more complex workflows.
ExampleThis is a fully running example, @tadpole/cli is published on npm:
tadpole run redfin.kdl --input '{"text": "Seattle, WA"}' --auto --output output.json
import "modules/redfin/mod.kdl" repo="github.com/tadpolehq/community"
main {
new_page {
redfin.search text="=text"
wait_until
redfin.extract_from_card extract_to="addresses" {
address {
redfin.extract_address_from_card
}
}
}
}
Roadmap?
Planned for 0.2.0 Control Flow: Add maybe (effectively try/catch) and loop (while {}, do {})
DOMPick: Used to select elements by index
DOMFilter: Used to filter elements using evaluators
More Evaluators: Type casting, regex, exists
Root Slots: Support for top level dynamic placeholders
Error Reporting: More robust error reporting
Logging: More consistent logging from actions and add log action to global registry
0.3.0 Piping: Allowing different files to chain input/output.
Outputs: Complex output sinks to databases, s3, kafka, etc.
DAGs: Use directed acylic graphs to create complex crawling scenarios and parallel compute.
Github Repository: https://github.com/tadpolehq/tadpoleI've also created a community repository for sharing scraper logic: https://github.com/tadpolehq/community
Feedback would be greatly appreciated!
So KDL is like another JSON or Yaml. FSL-1.1-ALv2 is an, almost but not really, open source license that after a 2 years becomes available under a real open source license. It's to prevent free loading from companies or something. Sounds fine to me actually.
KDL is more than just JSON or YAML. It's node based. It's output in libraries is effectively an AST and its use cases are open ended.