Millipede
Guides

Guides

Concepts and operating practices for building reliable Millipede crawlers.

Use these guides after the introduction course when you need to understand a subsystem, make a crawler durable, or tune its behavior in production.

Core concepts

  • Guides overview provides the reading map from shared crawler concepts through storage, operations, and extension policy.
  • Architecture explains how the generic engine, crawler kinds, typed contexts, handlers, and storage contracts fit together.
  • Router shows how unlabeled requests, labeled routes, method filters, middleware, and the fallback handler select application code.
  • Enqueue links follows discovered URLs through extraction, filtering, transformation, crawl limits, and queue deduplication.

Storage

  • Storages introduces request queues, datasets, key-value stores, named stores, and typed saved state.
  • Storage backends compares process-local memory with Crawlee-compatible filesystem persistence and gives a safe migration procedure.
  • Sitemap crawling combines a streaming sitemap request list with the normal deduplicating request queue.

Operations

  • Configuration documents resolved defaults, builder precedence, storage injection, startup purging, and Crawlee-compatible environment variables.
  • Sessions and proxies covers identity state, cookie continuity, proxy selection, and health reporting.
  • Error handling separates retryable, session-rotating, permanent, and critical failures and explains terminal failure handling.
  • Autoscaling connects concurrency modes, resource signals, rate limits, and same-domain pacing.
  • Browser pools describes browser reuse, page lifecycle, launch settings, and shutdown behavior.
  • Fingerprinting keeps generated HTTP headers and browser identities coherent while stating the current limits.

Meta

  • Migrating from Crawlee maps familiar Crawlee concepts onto Millipede's typed Rust APIs and deliberate differences.
  • Extras policy defines when an integration belongs in a community helper crate and what it takes to graduate into the core workspace.

Next steps

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