# Crawler
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A high performance web crawler / scraper in Elixir, with worker pooling and rate limiting via [OPQ](https://github.com/fredwu/opq).
## Features
- Crawl assets (javascript, css and images).
- Save to disk.
- Hook for scraping content.
- Restrict crawlable domains, paths or content types.
- Limit concurrent crawlers.
- Limit rate of crawling.
- Set the maximum crawl depth.
- Set timeouts.
- Set retries strategy.
- Set crawler's user agent.
- Manually pause/resume/stop the crawler.
See [Hex documentation](https://hexdocs.pm/crawler/).
## Architecture
Below is a very high level architecture diagram demonstrating how Crawler works.
## Usage
```elixir
Crawler.crawl("http://elixir-lang.org", max_depths: 2)
```
There are several ways to access the crawled page data:
1. Use [`Crawler.Store`](https://hexdocs.pm/crawler/Crawler.Store.html)
2. Tap into the registry([?](https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Registry.html)) [`Crawler.Store.DB`](lib/crawler/store.ex)
3. Use your own [scraper](#custom-modules)
4. If the `:save_to` option is set, pages will be saved to disk in addition to the above mentioned places
5. Provide your own [custom parser](#custom-modules) and manage how data is stored and accessed yourself
## Configurations
| Option | Type | Default Value | Description |
| ------------- | ------- | --------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| `:assets` | list | `[]` | Whether to fetch any asset files, available options: `"css"`, `"js"`, `"images"`. |
| `:save_to` | string | `nil` | When provided, the path for saving crawled pages. |
| `:workers` | integer | `10` | Maximum number of concurrent workers for crawling. |
| `:interval` | integer | `0` | Rate limit control - number of milliseconds before crawling more pages, defaults to `0` which is effectively no rate limit. |
| `:max_depths` | integer | `3` | Maximum nested depth of pages to crawl. |
| `:max_pages` | integer | `:infinity` | Maximum amount of pages to crawl. |
| `:timeout` | integer | `5000` | Timeout value for fetching a page, in ms. Can also be set to `:infinity`, useful when combined with `Crawler.pause/1`. |
| `:store` | module | `nil` | Module for storing the crawled page data and crawling metadata, defaults to `nil`. You can also set it to `Crawler.Store` or your own, see `Crawler.Store.add_page_data/3` for implementation details. |
| `:force` | boolean | `false` | Force crawling URLs even if they have already been crawled, useful if you want to refresh the crawled data. |
| `:scope` | term | `nil` | Similar to `:force`, but you can pass a custom `:scope` to determine how Crawler should perform on links already seen. |
| `:user_agent` | string | `Crawler/x.x.x (...)` | User-Agent value sent by the fetch requests. |
| `:url_filter` | module | `Crawler.Fetcher.UrlFilter` | Custom URL filter, useful for restricting crawlable domains, paths or content types. |
| `:retrier` | module | `Crawler.Fetcher.Retrier` | Custom fetch retrier, useful for retrying failed crawls. |
| `:modifier` | module | `Crawler.Fetcher.Modifier` | Custom modifier, useful for adding custom request headers or options. |
| `:scraper` | module | `Crawler.Scraper` | Custom scraper, useful for scraping content as soon as the parser parses it. |
| `:parser` | module | `Crawler.Parser` | Custom parser, useful for handling parsing differently or to add extra functionalities. |
| `:encode_uri` | boolean | `false` | When set to `true` apply the `URI.encode` to the URL to be crawled. |
| `:queue` | pid | `nil` | You can pass in an `OPQ` pid so that multiple crawlers can share the same queue. |
## Custom Modules
It is possible to swap in your custom logic as shown in the configurations section. Your custom modules need to conform to their respective behaviours:
### Retrier
See [`Crawler.Fetcher.Retrier`](lib/crawler/fetcher/retrier.ex).
Crawler uses [ElixirRetry](https://github.com/safwank/ElixirRetry)'s exponential backoff strategy by default.
```elixir
defmodule CustomRetrier do
@behaviour Crawler.Fetcher.Retrier.Spec
end
```
### URL Filter
See [`Crawler.Fetcher.UrlFilter`](lib/crawler/fetcher/url_filter.ex).
```elixir
defmodule CustomUrlFilter do
@behaviour Crawler.Fetcher.UrlFilter.Spec
end
```
### Scraper
See [`Crawler.Scraper`](lib/crawler/scraper.ex).
```elixir
defmodule CustomScraper do
@behaviour Crawler.Scraper.Spec
end
```
### Parser
See [`Crawler.Parser`](lib/crawler/parser.ex).
```elixir
defmodule CustomParser do
@behaviour Crawler.Parser.Spec
end
```
### Modifier
See [`Crawler.Fetcher.Modifier`](lib/crawler/fetcher/modifier.ex).
```elixir
defmodule CustomModifier do
@behaviour Crawler.Fetcher.Modifier.Spec
end
```
## Pause / Resume / Stop Crawler
Crawler provides `pause/1`, `resume/1` and `stop/1`, see below.
```elixir
{:ok, opts} = Crawler.crawl("https://elixir-lang.org")
Crawler.running?(opts) # => true
Crawler.pause(opts)
Crawler.running?(opts) # => false
Crawler.resume(opts)
Crawler.running?(opts) # => true
Crawler.stop(opts)
Crawler.running?(opts) # => false
```
Please note that when pausing Crawler, you would need to set a large enough `:timeout` (or even set it to `:infinity`) otherwise parser would timeout due to unprocessed links.
## Multiple Crawlers
It is possible to start multiple crawlers sharing the same queue.
```elixir
{:ok, queue} = OPQ.init(worker: Crawler.Dispatcher.Worker, workers: 2)
Crawler.crawl("https://elixir-lang.org", queue: queue)
Crawler.crawl("https://github.com", queue: queue)
```
## Find All Scraped URLs
```elixir
Crawler.Store.all_urls() # => ["https://elixir-lang.org", "https://google.com", ...]
```
## Examples
### Google Search + Github
This example performs a Google search, then scrapes the results to find Github projects and output their name and description.
See the [source code](examples/google_search.ex).
You can run the example by cloning the repo and run the command:
```shell
mix run -e "Crawler.Example.GoogleSearch.run()"
```
## API Reference
Please see https://hexdocs.pm/crawler.
## Changelog
Please see [CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md).
## Copyright and License
Copyright (c) 2016 Fred Wu
This work is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the [MIT License](http://fredwu.mit-license.org/).
