How can I trigger same Cloud Run job/service using different arguments?

Question

I'm trying to make a scrapy scraper work using cloud run. The main idea is that every 20 minutes a cloud scheduler cron should trigger the web scraper and get data from different sites. All sites have the same structure, so I would like to use same code and parallelize the execution of the scraping job, doing something like scrapy crawl scraper -a site=www.site1.com and scrapy crawl scraper -a site=www.site2.com.

I have already deployed a version of the scraper, but it only can do scrapy crawl scraper. How can I do that at execution the command's site change?

Also, should I be using cloud run job or service?

Answer 1

According to that page of documentation, there is a trick.

• Define a number of task, let's say, you set the number of task equal to the number of site to scrap. use the --task parameter for that
• In your container (or in Cloud Storage, but if you do that, you have to download the file before starting the process), add a file with 1 website to scrap per line.
• At runtime, use the CLOUD_RUN_TASK_INDEX environment variable. That variable indicate the number of the task in the execution. For each different number, pick a line in your file of websites (the number of the line equal to the env var value).

Like that, you can leverage Cloud Run jobs and parallelism.

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The main tradeoff here is the static form of the websites list to scrap.

Answer 2

You can pass in overrides. For example, when calling a job from the cloud cli sdk, you can pass args, which can contain alternative args to be passed to your script