A practical guide to web scraping with Ruby
One of the benefits of Ruby's developer-friendly syntax is that it's straightforward to quickly build scripts to automate tasks. Web scraping with Ruby is fun, useful, and straightforward. In this article, we'll explore using HTTParty to pull a web page and check it for a given string. To be specific, we'll build a cron job in Ruby to check if a product is in stock on a website!
Have you ever wanted to be alerted to a product restock before everyone else who submitted their email address in the "notify me when in stock" form? By the end of this article, you'll have built your own software that checks a website for given text and notifies you when it changes.
This step-by-step tutorial goes beyond learning to scrape a web page - you'll create a practical, real-world application with Ruby. We'll start by exploring the necessary dependencies and then move on to writing the core functionality.
Finally, we'll show you how to deploy your Ruby web scraper so it runs on a recurring schedule, keeping you up to date with changes to your target web pages. Whether you're a seasoned Ruby developer or just getting started, this guide will provide you with valuable insights and techniques to enhance your web scraping projects.
