charles

charles

Smart web crawler.

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:

• PhantomJsDriver
• FirefoxDriver
• ChromeDriver etc

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 -Dgoogle.chrome={path/to/chrome} -Pitcases

passes before making a PR.

Google Chrome has to have a version >=59, in order to support headless mode.

Integration tests

Integration tests are performed with Google Chrome run in headless mode.
You also need to install chromedriver in order for everything to work.

You can skip the integration tests by omitting -Pitcases from the build command.