SimpleCrawler

• This web crawler can be used to crawl a website from the command line or code

Install

• Python required (3.6+) https://www.python.org/downloads/
• pip install SimpleCrawler

OR

• git clone https://github.com/jackwardell/SimpleCrawler.git
• cd SimpleCrawler
• python3 -m venv venv
• source venv/bin/activate
• pip install --upgrade pip
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• pip install -e .
• pytest
• crawl https://www.example.com

Rules:

This crawler will:

• Only crawl text/html mime-types
• Only crawl pages that return 200 OK HTTP statuses
• Look at /robots.txt and obey by default (but can be overridden)
• Add User-Agent, default value = PyWebCrawler (but can be changed)
• Ignore ?query=strings and #fragments by default (but can be changed)
• Get links from ONLY href value in click here tags

Todo:

• Nicer logging
• Crawl client errors and server error pages? (Most websites have 404 & 500 handlers which may have links)
• Parse more than just tags and href attrs e.g. src='/some-link'
• Add a scheduler / wait frequency (Politeness)
• Request timeout

Use

• just type crawl <url> into your command line e.g. crawl https://www.google.com

$ crawl --help
Usage: crawl [OPTIONS] URL

Options:
  -u, --user-agent TEXT
  -w, --max-workers INTEGER
  -t, --timeout INTEGER
  -h, --check-head
  -d, --disobey-robots
  -wq, --with-query
  -wf, --with-fragment
  --debug / --no-debug
  --help                     Show this message and exit.

• optional params:
  • "--user-agent" or "-u"
    • what the User-Agent header param is
    • default = 'PyWebCrawler'
  • "--max-workers" or "-w"
    • max number of worker threads
    • default = 1
  • "--timeout" or "-t"
    • how long to wait for new items from work queue before shutting down
    • default = 10
  • "--check-head" or "-t"
    • whether to send HEAD request before sending GET request
    • why? some GET responses will be large (e.g. pdf) and sending HEAD request first will allow crawler to see MIME type before it makes a GET request, therefore averting the GET request altogether
    • default = False
  • "--disobey-robots" or "-d"
    • whether to disobey robots.txt file
    • default = False
  • "--with-query" or "-wq"
    • whether to allow query args e.g. https://www.example.com/?hello=world -> https://www.example.com/ if not --with-query
    • default = False
  • "--with-fragment" or "-wf"
    • whether to allow fragments e.g. https://www.example.com/#helloworld -> https://www.example.com/ if not --with-fragment
    • default = False
  • "--debug/--no-debug", default=False
    • whether to run the crawl, if debug on, then it wont crawl but will pump out crawler config
    • default = False

OR from code

from simple_crawler import Crawler

crawler = Crawler()
found_links = crawler.crawl('https://www.example.com/')