bulac-scraper

Digital Bulac Library Scraper

📔 Table of Contents

• About the Project
  • Environment Variables
• Getting Started
  • Prerequisites
  • Run Locally
• Usage
• Contributing
  • Code of Conduct
• License
• Contact

🌟 About the Project

🔑 Environment Variables

To run this project, you will need to add the following environment variables to your .env file:

• App configs:
  • LOG_LEVEL: Log level.
  • LOG_FILE_PATH: (Optional) File path to save logs. Default to scraper.log.

E.g:

# .env
LOG_LEVEL=info

You can also check out the file .env.example to see all required environment variables.

🧰 Getting Started

‼️ Prerequisites

• This project uses pnpm as package manager:

  npm install --global pnpm

🏃 Run Locally

Clone the project:

git clone https://github.com/v-bible/bulac-scraper.git

Go to the project directory:

cd bulac-scraper

Install dependencies:

pnpm install

Build the project:

pnpm build

👀 Usage

Note

Support both "ark:" links (recommended) and manifest ("iiif") links. To get the manifest url of a document, you can go to the document page on Bulac, click on the "IIIF" button below the document viewer.

USAGE
  bulac-scraper [--outDir value] [--height value] [--width value] [--toPdf] [--ignoreCompleted] [--overwrite] [--fromFile value] <args>...
  bulac-scraper --help
  bulac-scraper --version

Digital Bulac Library Scraper

FLAGS
     [--outDir]                               Output directory. Default to "./output/<document-name>"
     [--height]                               Image height. Default to 982 pixels
     [--width]                                Image width
     [--toPdf/--noToPdf]                      Convert downloaded images to a single PDF file
     [--ignoreCompleted/--noIgnoreCompleted]  Skip downloading if all images already exist in the output directory, or PDF already exists if --toPdf is set
     [--overwrite/--noOverwrite]              Overwrite existing files if they already exist in the output directory
     [--fromFile]                             Path to a text file containing a list of document urls to scrape from Bulac (one url per line)
  -h  --help                                  Print help information and exit
  -v  --version                               Print version information and exit

ARGUMENTS
  args...  List of document urls to scrape from Bulac (e.g., "https://bina.bulac.fr/s/bina/ark:/73193/bcrk5b", "https://bina.bulac.fr/iiif/2/579892/manifest")

Note

For image size, you should only specify either height or width, but not both. This is because the images are served in a way that maintains their aspect ratio. If you specify both height and width, the images may be distorted. If you want to specify both, make sure you know the original aspect ratio of the images.

Example:

pnpm build && ./dist/cli.mjs --outDir ./my-output --toPdf https://bina.bulac.fr/s/bina/ark:/73193/bcrk5b https://bina.bulac.fr/iiif/2/572900/manifest

pmpn build && ./dist/cli.mjs --outDir ./my-output --toPdf --ignoreCompleted --overwrite --fromFile ./document-urls.txt

Crawl URL from Bulac category

A small script is provided to crawl all document urls from a given Bulac category page. You can run it as follows, requires uv tool to be installed:

# scraper.py
# /// script
# dependencies = [
#   "beautifulsoup4",
#   "requests",
# ]
# ///

import time
from urllib.parse import urljoin
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


def scrape_bina_ark_urls(start_url):
    session = requests.Session()
    session.headers.update(
        {
            "User-Agent": (
                "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) "
                "AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) "
                "Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
            )
        }
    )

    current_url = start_url
    ark_urls = set()
    page = 1

    while current_url:
        print(f"Scraping page {page}: {current_url}")
        response = session.get(current_url)

        if response.status_code != 200:
            print(f"Failed to fetch page {page}. Status: {response.status_code}")
            break

        soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

        # Extract links containing the ARK identifier pattern ('ark:/')
        for a_tag in soup.find_all("a", href=True):
            href = a_tag["href"]
            if "ark:/" in href:
                full_url = urljoin(current_url, href)
                # Strip query strings and fragment identifiers
                clean_url = full_url.split("?")[0].split("#")[0]
                ark_urls.add(clean_url)

        # Locate pagination "Next" link
        next_link = soup.find("a", attrs={"rel": "next"}) or soup.find(
            "a", class_=lambda c: c and "next" in c.split()
        )

        if next_link and next_link.get("href"):
            next_href = next_link["href"]
            current_url = urljoin(current_url, next_href)
            page += 1
            time.sleep(1)
        else:
            print("No next page link found. Pagination complete.")
            current_url = None

    return list(ark_urls)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    target_url = (
        "https://bina.bulac.fr/s/bina/item?Search=&property%5B0%5D%5Bproperty%5D=51&property%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=eq&property%5B0%5D%5Btext%5D=https://www.idref.fr/029517486"
    )

    extracted_links = scrape_bina_ark_urls(target_url)

    print(f"\nSuccessfully collected {len(extracted_links)} ARK URLs:")
    for link in extracted_links:
        print(link)

uv run ./scraper.py

👋 Contributing

Contributions are always welcome!

Please read the contribution guidelines.

📜 Code of Conduct

Please read the Code of Conduct.

⚠️ License

This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License.

.

See the LICENSE.md file for full details.

🤝 Contact

Duong Vinh - @duckymomo20012 - tienvinh.duong4@gmail.com

Project Link: https://github.com/v-bible/bulac-scraper.