Patu

A small spider, useful for checking a site for 404s and 500s. Patu requires httplib2 and lxml:

pip install -U httplib2 lxml

Quick Usage

To see available options:

patu.py –help

To spider an entire site using 5 workers, only showing errors:

patu.py –spiders=5 www.example.com

To spider, stopping after the first level of links:

patu.py –depth=1 www.example.com

To get a list of every linked page on a site:

patu.py –generate www.example.com > urls.txt

Instead of spidering for URLs, use a file instead and show all responses:

patu.py –input=urls.txt –verbose www.example.com

Format of URLs File

The output produced by <code>–generate</code> is formatted like so:

FIRST_URL<TAB>None LINK1<TAB>REFERER LINK2<TAB>REFERER

<code>–input</code> can take a file of that format, or one URL per line with no referer. <code>–input=-</code> reads from stdin.

Testing

Patu uses Nose for testing. To install Nose and test:

pip install -U nose nosetests