NOTE: This project is no longer being maintained by me. If you are interested in taking over maintenance of this project, let me know.
Crawl, as it's name implies, will crawl around a website, discovering all of the links and their relationships starting from a base URL. The output of crawl is a JSON object representing a sitemap of every resource within a site, including each links outbound references and any inbound refferers.
Crawl is a Node.js based library that can be used as a module within another application, or as a stand alone tool via it's command line interface (CLI).
To install crawl you must first have both Node.js and NPM installed, both of which are outside the scope of this tool. See the Node.js Website for details on how to install Node.js. Personaly I am found of Tim Caswell's excelent NVM tool for insalling and managing node.
Once NPM is installed, simply install Crawl by executing the following from the command line:
npm install crawl -g
Once installed, you can explore what crawl can do by simply typing crawl into the command line. You will get the built in help that looks something like this:
Usage: crawl left [right]
Options:
-v, --verbose Verbose logging [boolean]
-P, --pretty Pretty print the results [boolean]
-H, --headers Include the raw response headers in the results [boolean]
-b, --body Include the raw response body in the results [boolean]
-u, --username HTTP Basic Auth Username [string]
-p, --password HTTP Basic Auth Password [string]
Executing crawl http://your-domain.com will produce results similar to:
[
{
"url": "http://your-domain.com/",
"status": 200,
"contentType": "text/html",
"checksum": "6959d6e6066e97c3f94a96fb8e5909f4025b27508a09416ac680118953a542b2",
"date": "2013-01-22T22:10:39.404Z",
"links": [
"/css/boilerplate.css",
...
"http://vimeo.com/your-domain"
],
"referrers": [
"http://your-domain.com/",
...
"http://your-domain.com/about/"
]
},
...
{
"url": "http://your-domain.com/about/",
"status": 200,
"contentType": "text/html; charset=UTF-8",
"checksum": "cac058cba6f9ba7f5de33f6a3ee07f5442c9cdf5d074a3fdb5e7247a211372a5",
"date": "2013-01-22T22:10:39.636Z",
"referrers": [
"http://your-domain.com/",
...
"http://your-domain.com/blog/"
],
"links": [
"/",
...
"/blog/"
]
}
]
Crawl is rather simple to use in your own code. Simple include crawl as a dependency of your project (add to package.json, etc) then integrate like so:
var crawl = require('crawl');
crawl.crawl("http://your-domain.com", function(err, pages) {
if (err) {
console.error("An error occured", err);
return;
}
console.log(JSON.stringify(pages));
});
The most basic use case for crawl is to crawl a site and use the resulting JSON object as input to another process. See Capture for an example of a tool that can consume the output of Crawl to generate screenshots of every page in a website.
For example, you may crawl and generate screenshots of a site using crawl and capture by executing the following:
crawl http://your-domain.com | capture
This will crawl your base url, discovering each page, then feed that to PhantomJS to generate a screenshot of each URL, placing it in the current working directory.
Copyright (c) Mike Moulton
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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