A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Scalable Distributed Crawler for Scraping Millions of Top TikTok Profiles

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Introduction
In this tutorial, we will walk you through the process of building a distributed crawler that can efficiently scrape millions of top TikTok profiles. Before we embark on this tutorial, it is crucial to have a solid grasp of fundamental concepts like web scraping, the Golang programming language, Docker, and Kubernetes (k8s). Additionally, being familiar with essential libraries such as Golang Colly for efficient web scraping and Golang Gin for building powerful APIs will greatly enhance your learning experience. By following this tutorial, you will gain insight into building a scalable and distributed system to extract profile information from TikTok.

Developing a Deeper Understanding of the Website You Want to Scrape.

Before delving into writing the code, it is imperative to thoroughly analyze and understand the structure of TikTok’s website. To facilitate this process, we recommend using the convenient “Quick Javascript Switcher” Chrome plugin, available here. This invaluable tool allows you to disable and re-enable JavaScript with a single mouse-click. By doing so, we aim to optimize our scraping workflow, to increase efficiency, and to minimize costs by minimizing the reliance on JavaScript rendering.