Building an EU Safety Gate (RAPEX) Product Recall Scraper With Python

#python #webscraping #opensource #tutorial

Every week the EU publishes the product recalls that keep dangerous goods off the shelves — the Safety Gate (RAPEX) portal. It's open data, but it's buried behind a JavaScript SPA, so most teams never build on it. I did.

The gap

The reference actor in this niche couldn't even be trialled: it carries a $5 minimum charge and our account had $4.69 of budget left. One dollar short, locked out. So instead of paying to watch someone else's implementation, I reverse-engineered the upstream directly — a strictly better outcome.

The source

The EU Safety Gate portal exposes a pure JSON API:

POST /public/api/search — the search contract
GET /public/api/notification/{id}?language=en — per-alert detail

No auth, no cookies, no browser. I captured the exact endpoints and payloads from the live SPA's network traffic, then ground-truthed the date semantics against real notifications.

The smoke test

Input {category: "Electrical appliances and equipment", country: "DE", dateFrom: "2026-07-01"}:

SUCCEEDED, 17 items, 17/17 complete
Every record has reference, productName, riskTypes, riskDescription
Unique reference numbers, date window exactly 2026-07-01..2026-08-11
Run cost: $0.007 — seven-tenths of a cent for 17 recalls

The honest bits

The API covers consumer products, vehicles, and some professional equipment — not medical devices or food
Search is a POST contract, so you need the right payload shape; a bare GET returns nothing
Risk descriptions are free text in the EU's own taxonomy — normalise carefully

Try it

👉 EU Safety Gate (RAPEX) Product Recall Scraper on Apify Store

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