/charles

Java web crawling library

Primary LanguageJavaBSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" LicenseBSD-3-Clause

charles

Smart web crawler.

DevOps By Rultor.com Build Status PDD status Coverage Status

A smart web crawler that fetches data from a website and stores it in some way (writes it in files on the disk or POSTs it to an http endpoint etc) .

More options for crawling:

  1. crawl the links from a sitemap.xml

  2. crawl the website as a graph starting from a given url (the index)

  3. crawl with retrial if any RuntimeException happens etc

More details in this post.

Maven dependency

Get it using Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.amihaiemil.web</groupId>
    <artifactId>charles</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.1</version>
</dependency>

or take the fat jar.

Under the hood

Charles is powered by Selenium WebDriver. Any WebDriver implementation can be used to build a WebCrawl Examples:

Since it uses a web driver to render the pages, also any dynamic content will be crawled (e.g. content generated by javascript)

How to contribute

Read this post.

  1. Open an issue regarding an improvement you thought of, or a bug you noticed.
  2. If the issue is confirmed, fork the repository, do the changes on a sepparate branch and make a Pull Request.
  3. After review and acceptance, the PR is merged and closed.
  4. You are automatically listed as a contributor on the project's site

Make sure the maven build

$mvn clean install -Pitcases

passes before making a PR.

Running integration tests:

In order to run the integration tests you need to have PhantomJS installed on your machine and set the JVM system property phantomjsExec to point to that location. By default the exe is looked up at /usr/local/bin/phantomjs (linux), so if it's not found the tests won't work.