Scout

Quick Start

One page summary of how to start using Scout.

Requirements

Scout currently requires the FireFox browser and Geckodriver installed.

Step 1: Installation

Scout can be installed in one of two ways:

  1. Cargo (requires Rust)
cargo install scoutlang
  1. Download and run installation script (requires Python3)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maxmindlin/scout-lang/main/scripts/installer.py | python3

Both install the Scout interpreter and add it to your path as scout.

Step 2: Explore the REPL

The REPL opens a debugging session and lets you execute crawling scripts line by line. Its a great place to explore the Scout language and test run your crawling scripts.

scout

If you want a debugging browser window to open as well then set the env var export SCOUT_DEBUG=true:

SCOUT_DEBUG=true scout

This also works when running script files!

Step 3: Install the VSCode extension (if applicable)

ScoutLang maintains a VSCode extension.

Step 4: Create your first Scout file

Now lets create your first Scout file

touch my-first-file.sct

and add this content to the file:

goto "https://github.com/maxmindlin/scout-lang"
about = $".f4.my-3"
about |> textContent() |> print()

Then run it!

scout my-first-file.sct

or with a debugging window open:

SCOUT_DEBUG=true scout my-first-file.sct

You should see the about section printed out in your terminal, along with a results json object that we will cover later:

A web crawling programming language
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