ispider_core

ispider is a module to spider websites

• Multicore and multithreaded
• Accepts hundreds/thousands of websites/domains as input
• Sparse requests to avoid repeated calls against the same domain
• The httpx engine works in asyncio blocks defined by settings.ASYNC_BLOCK_SIZE, so total concurrent threads are ASYNC_BLOCK_SIZE * POOLS
• It supports retry with different engines (httpx, curl, seleniumbase [testing])

It was designed for maximum speed, so it has some limitations:

• As of v0.7, it does not support files (pdf, video, images, etc); it only processes HTML

HOW IT WORKS - SIMPLE

-- Crawl - Depth == 0

• Get all the landing pages for domains in the provided list.
• If "robots" is selected, download the robots.txt file.
• If "sitemaps" is selected, parse the robots.txt and retrieve all the sitemaps.
• All data is saved under USER_DATA/data/dumps/dom_tld.

-- Spider - Depth > 0

• Extract all links from landing pages and sitemaps.
• Download the HTML pages, extract internal links, and follow them recursively.

HOW IT WORKS - MORE DETAILED

Crawl - Depth == 0

• Create objects in the form (('https://domain.com', 'landing_page', 'domain.com', depth, retries, engine))
• Add them to the LIFO queue qout
• A thread retrieves elements from qout in variable-size blocks (depending on QUEUE_MAX_SIZE)
• Fill a FIFO queue qin
• Different workers (defined in settings.POOLS) get elements from qin and download them to USER_DATA/data/dumps/dom_tld
• Landing pages are saved as _.html
• Each worker processes the landing page; if the result is OK (status_code == 200), it tries to get robots.txt
• On failure, it tries the next available engine (fallback)
• It creates an object (('https://domain.com/robots.txt', 'robots', 'domain.com', depth=1, retries=0, engine))
• Each worker retrieves the robots.txt; if "sitemaps" is defined in settings.CRAWL_METHODS, it attempts to get all sitemaps from robots.txt and dom_tld/sitemaps.xml
• It creates objects (('https://domain.com/sitemap.xml', 'sitemaps', 'domain.com', depth=1, retries=0, engine)) and for other sitemaps found in robots.txt
• Every successful or failed download is logged as a row in USER_FOLDER/jsons/crawl_conn_meta*json with all information available from the engine; these files are useful for statistics/reports from the spider
• When there are no more elements in qin, after a 90-second timeout, jobs stop.

Spider - Depths > 0

• It reads entries from USER_FOLDER/jsons/crawl_conn_meta*json for the domains in the list
• It retrieves landing pages and sitemaps
• If sitemaps are compressed, it uncompresses them
• Extract all links from landing pages and sitemaps
• Create objects (('https://domain.com/link1', 'internals', 'domain.com', depth=2, retries=0, engine))
• Use the same engine that was used for the last successful request to the domain TLD
• Add these objects to qout
• Thread qin moves blocks from qout to qin, sparsing them
• Download all links, save them, and save data in JSON
• Parse the HTML, extract all INTERNAL links, follow them recursively, increasing depth

Schema

This is the projectual schema of the crawler/spider

USAGE

Install it

pip install ispider

First use

from ispider_core import ISpider

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Check the readme for the complete avail parameters
    config_overrides = {
        'USER_FOLDER': '/Your/Dump/Folder',
        'POOLS': 64,
        'ASYNC_BLOCK_SIZE': 32,
        'MAXIMUM_RETRIES': 2,
        'CRAWL_METHODS': [],
        'CODES_TO_RETRY': [430, 503, 500, 429],
        'CURL_INSECURE': True,
        'ENGINES': ['curl'],
        'EXCLUDED_DOMAINS': ['facebook.com', 'instagram.com']
    }

    # Specify a list of domains
    doms = ['domain1.com', 'domain2.com'....]

    # Run
    with ISpider(domains=doms, **config_overrides) as spider:
        spider.run()

TO KNOW

At first execution,

• It creates the folder settings.USER_FOLDER

• It creates settings.USER_FOLDER/data/ with dumps/ and jsons/

• settings.USER_FOLDER/data/dumps are the downloaded websites

• settings.USER_FOLDER/data/jsons are the connection results for every request

SETTINGS

Actual default settings are:

    """
    ## *********************************
    ## GENERIC SETTINGS
    # Output folder for controllers, dumps and jsons
    USER_FOLDER = "~/.ispider/"

    # Log level
    LOG_LEVEL = 'DEBUG'

    ## i.e., status_code = 430
    CODES_TO_RETRY = [430, 503, 500, 429]
    MAXIMUM_RETRIES = 2

    # Delay time after some status code to be retried
    TIME_DELAY_RETRY = 0

    ## Number of concurrent connection on the same process during crawling
    # Concurrent por process
    ASYNC_BLOCK_SIZE = 4

    # Concurrent processes (number of cores used, check your CPU spec)
    POOLS = 4

    # Max timeout for connecting,
    TIMEOUT = 5

    # This need to be a list, 
    # curl is used as subprocess, so be sure you installed it on your system
    # Retry will use next available engine.
    # The script begins wit the suprfast httpx
    # If fail, try with curl
    # If fail, it tries with seleniumbase, headless and uc mode activate
    ENGINES = ['httpx', 'curl', 'seleniumbase']

    CURL_INSECURE = False

    ## *********************************
    # CRAWLER
    # File size 
    # Max file size dumped on the disk. 
    # This to avoid big sitemaps with errors.
    MAX_CRAWL_DUMP_SIZE = 52428800

    # Max depth to follow in sitemaps
    SITEMAPS_MAX_DEPTH = 2

    # Crawler will get robots and sitemaps too
    CRAWL_METHODS = ['robots', 'sitemaps']

    ## *********************************
    ## SPIDER
    # Queue max, till 1 billion is ok on normal systems
    QUEUE_MAX_SIZE = 100000

    # Max depth to follow in websites
    WEBSITES_MAX_DEPTH = 2

    # This is not implemented yet
    MAX_PAGES_POR_DOMAIN = 1000000

    # This try to exclude some kind of files
    # It also test first bits of content of some common files, 
    # to exclude them even if online element has no extension
    EXCLUDED_EXTENSIONS = [
        "pdf", "csv",
        "mp3", "jpg", "jpeg", "png", "gif", "bmp", "tiff", "webp", "svg", "ico", "tif",
        "jfif", "eps", "raw", "cr2", "nef", "orf", "arw", "rw2", "sr2", "dng", "heif", "avif", "jp2", "jpx",
        "wdp", "hdp", "psd", "ai", "cdr", "ppsx"
        "ics", "ogv",
        "mpg", "mp4", "mov", "m4v",
        "zip", "rar"
    ]

    # Exclude all urls that contains this REGEX
    EXCLUDED_EXPRESSIONS_URL = [
        # r'test',
    ]

    # If not empty, follow only URLs that match these regex patterns
    INCLUDED_EXPRESSIONS_URL = [
        # r'/\d{4}/\d{2}/\d{2}/',
    ]

    # Exclude specific domains from crawling/spidering.
    # Accepts values like "example.com" or full URLs.
    EXCLUDED_DOMAINS = []

    """

NOTES

• Deduplication is not 100% safe, sometimes pages are downloaded multiple times, and skipped in file check. On ~10 domains, check duplication has small delay. But on 10000 domains after 500k links, the domain list is so big that checking if a link is already downloaded or not was decreasing considerably the speed (from 30000 urls/min to 300 urls/min). That's why I preferred avoid a list, and left just "check file".

SEO checks (modular)

You can run independent SEO checks during crawling/spidering. Results are stored in each JSON response row under seo_issues.

Available checks:

• response_crawlability: flags 3xx/4xx/5xx, redirect chains, and timeouts.
• broken_links: generic status >= 400 detector.
• http_status_503: dedicated 503 detector.
• title_meta_quality: validates <title> and meta description length/presence and flags title == h1.
• h1_too_long: validates H1 length threshold.
• heading_structure: checks h1 count and heading-order skips.
• indexability_canonical: checks canonical presence/self-reference, homepage canonicals, and noindex directives.
• schema_news_article: detects NewsArticle structured data and required properties.
• image_optimization: flags missing image dimensions/ALT and oversized hero hints.
• internal_linking: flags weak anchors, no internal links, and too many external links.
• url_hygiene: validates URL length/case/params/special chars and the newsroom pattern /yyyy/mm/dd/slug/.
• content_length: flags thin content (default <250 words).
• security_headers: checks HSTS, CSP, and X-Frame-Options.

SEO issue codes (priority + short description)

Configure with settings:

config_overrides = {
    'SEO_CHECKS_ENABLED': True,
    'SEO_ENABLED_CHECKS': ['response_crawlability', 'title_meta_quality', 'schema_news_article'],
    'SEO_DISABLED_CHECKS': ['http_status_503'],
    'SEO_H1_MAX_CHARS': 70,
}

Tip for Google News-focused runs: combine INCLUDED_EXPRESSIONS_URL with a day filter (example: r'^.*/2026/02/07/.*$') and keep response_crawlability, indexability_canonical, and schema_news_article enabled.

To add a new check, create a class in ispider_core/seo/checks/ with name and run(resp) and register it in ispider_core/seo/runner.py.