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grab-site

grab-site is an easy preconfigured web crawler designed for backing up websites. Give grab-site a URL and it will recursively crawl the site and write WARC files.

grab-site uses wpull for crawling. The wpull options are preconfigured based on Archive Team's experience with ArchiveBot.

grab-site gives you

  • a dashboard with all of your crawls, showing which URLs are being grabbed, how many URLs are left in the queue, and more.

  • the ability to add ignore patterns when the crawl is already running. This allows you to skip the crawling of junk URLs that would otherwise prevent your crawl from ever finishing. See below.

  • an extensively tested default ignore set ("global") as well as additional (optional) ignore sets for blogs, forums, etc.

  • duplicate page detection: links are not followed on pages whose content duplicates an already-seen page.

dashboard screenshot

Install on Ubuntu

On Ubuntu 14.04.1 or newer:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends git build-essential python3-dev python3-pip
pip3 install --user git+https://github.com/ludios/grab-site

To avoid having to type out ~/.local/bin/ below, add this to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin"

Install on OS X

On OS X 10.10:

  1. If xcode is not already installed, type gcc in Terminal; you will be prompted to install the command-line developer tools. Click 'Install'.

  2. If Python 3 is not already installed, install Python 3.4.3 using the installer from https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-343/

  3. pip3 install --user git+https://github.com/ludios/grab-site

Important usage note: Use ~/Library/Python/3.4/bin/ instead of ~/.local/bin/ for all instructions below!

To avoid having to type out ~/Library/Python/3.4/bin/ below, add this to your ~/.bash_profile (which may not exist yet):

PATH="$PATH:$HOME/Library/Python/3.4/bin"

Usage

First, start the dashboard with:

~/.local/bin/gs-server

and point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:29000/

Then, start as many crawls as you want with:

~/.local/bin/grab-site URL

Do this inside tmux unless they're very short crawls.

Options:

  • --igsets=blogs,forums: use ignore sets blogs and forums.

    Example: ~/.local/bin/grab-site URL --igsets=blogs,forums

    Note: igsets must be followed with = and not .

  • --no-offsite-links: avoid following links to a depth of 1 on other domains.

  • --1: grab just URL and page requisites without recursing.

  • --level=N: recurse N levels instead of inf levels.


Note: `URL` must always come **before** the options.

`forums` and `blogs` are some frequently-used ignore sets.
See [the full list of available ignore sets](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot/tree/master/db/ignore_patterns).

Just as with ArchiveBot, the [global](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot/blob/master/db/ignore_patterns/global.json)
ignore set is implied and enabled.

grab-site always grabs page requisites (e.g. inline images and stylesheets), even if
they are on other domains.  By default, grab-site also grabs linked pages to a depth
of 1 on other domains.  To turn off this behavior, use `--no-offsite-links`.

Using `--no-offsite-links` may prevent all kinds of useful images, video, audio, downloads,
etc from being grabbed, because these are often hosted on a CDN or subdomain, and
thus would otherwise not be included in the recursive crawl.


Changing ignores during the crawl
---
`grab-site` outputs WARCs, logs, and control files to a new subdirectory in the
directory from which you launched `grab-site`, referred to here as "DIR".
(Use `ls -lrt` to find it.)

While the crawl is running, you can edit `DIR/ignores` and `DIR/igsets`; the
changes will be applied as soon as the next URL is grabbed.

`DIR/igsets` is a comma-separated list of ignore sets to use.

`DIR/ignores` is a newline-separated list of [Python 3 regular expressions](http://pythex.org/)
to use in addition to the ignore sets.

You can `rm DIR/igoff` to display all URLs that are being filtered out
by the ignores, and `touch DIR/igoff` to turn it back off.


Stopping a crawl
---
You can `touch DIR/stop` or press ctrl-c, which will do the same.  You will
have to wait for the current downloads to finish.


Advanced `gs-server` options
---
These environmental variables control what `gs-server` listens on:

*	`GRAB_SITE_HTTP_INTERFACE` (default 0.0.0.0)
*	`GRAB_SITE_HTTP_PORT` (default 29000)
*	`GRAB_SITE_WS_INTERFACE` (default 0.0.0.0)
*	`GRAB_SITE_WS_PORT` (default 29001)

`GRAB_SITE_WS_PORT` should be 1 port higher than `GRAB_SITE_HTTP_PORT`,
or else you will have to add `?host=IP:PORT` to your dashboard URL.

These environmental variables control which server each `grab-site` process connects to:

*	`GRAB_SITE_WS_HOST` (default 127.0.0.1)
*	`GRAB_SITE_WS_PORT` (default 29001)


Help
---
Bugs, discussion, ideas are welcome in [grab-site/issues](https://github.com/ludios/grab-site/issues).

If a problem happens when running just `~/.local/bin/wpull -r URL` (no grab-site),
you may want to report it to [wpull/issues](https://github.com/chfoo/wpull/issues) instead.