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 includes ArchiveBot's killer feature of being able to add ignore patterns while 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.

Installation

On Ubuntu 14.04.1 or newer:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends git build-essential python3-dev python3-pip
pip3 install --user wpull manhole lmdb autobahn trollius
git clone https://github.com/ludios/grab-site
cd grab-site

Usage

./grab-site URL
./grab-site URL --igsets=blogs,forums
./grab-site URL --igsets=blogs,forums --no-offsite-links

Note: URL must come before the options.

Note: --igsets= means "ignore sets" and must have the =.

forums and blogs are some frequently-used ignore sets. See the full list of available ignore sets.

Just as with ArchiveBot, the global 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

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

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

DIR/ignores is a newline-separated list of Python 3 regular expressions to use in addition to the ignore sets.

You can touch DIR/igoff to stop IGNOR message spew, and rm DIR/igoff to turn it back on again.

Monitoring all of your crawls with the dashboard

Start the dashboard with:

./server.py

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

These environmental variables control what the 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)