smolcrawl 0.1.3

Crawls and indexes websites

SmolCrawl

A lightweight web crawler and indexer for creating searchable document collections from websites.

Overview

SmolCrawl is a Python-based tool that helps you:

• Crawl websites and extract content
• Convert HTML content to readable markdown
• Index pages for efficient searching
• Query indexed content with relevance scoring

Perfect for creating local knowledge bases, documentation search, or personal research collections.

Features

• Simple Web Crawling: Easily crawl and extract content from target websites
• Content Extraction: Automatically extracts meaningful content from HTML using readability algorithms
• Markdown Conversion: Converts HTML content to clean, readable markdown format
• Fast Indexing: Uses Tantivy (Rust-based search library) for performant full-text search
• Caching: Implements disk-based caching to avoid redundant crawling
• CLI Interface: Simple command-line interface for all operations

Installation

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/smolcrawl.git
cd smolcrawl

# Install the package
pip install -e .

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or higher
• Dependencies are automatically installed with the package

Usage

Crawl a Website

smolcrawl crawl https://example.com

Index a Website

smolcrawl index https://example.com my_index_name

List Available Indices

smolcrawl list_indices

Query an Index

smolcrawl query my_index_name "your search query" --limit 10 --score_threshold 0.5

Delete an Index

smolcrawl delete_index my_index_name

Configuration

SmolCrawl uses environment variables for configuration:

• STORAGE_PATH: Path to store data (default: ./data)
• CACHE_PATH: Path for caching (default: ./data/cache)

You can set these in a .env file in the project root.

Project Structure

smolcrawl/
├── src/smolcrawl/
│   ├── __init__.py    # CLI and entry points
│   ├── crawl.py       # Web crawling functionality
│   ├── db.py          # Indexing and search functionality
│   └── utils.py       # Utility functions
├── data/              # Storage for indices and cache (gitignored)
├── .gitignore
└── pyproject.toml     # Project metadata and dependencies

How It Works

1. Crawling: Uses BeautifulSoupCrawler to fetch web pages and extract links
2. Content Processing: Extracts meaningful content using ReadabiliPy and converts to markdown
3. Indexing: Stores extracted content in a Tantivy index for efficient searching
4. Searching: Performs full-text search on indexed content with relevance ranking

License

[Your License Choice]

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request