https://github.com/qri-io/walk

Webcrawler/sitemapper
https://github.com/qri-io/walk

Last synced: 16 days ago
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Webcrawler/sitemapper

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/qri-io/walk
• Owner: qri-io
• License: gpl-3.0
• Created: 2018-08-04T02:59:33.000Z (over 6 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2019-07-23T21:18:36.000Z (almost 6 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2025-03-26T03:11:17.027Z (about 1 month ago)
• Language: Go
• Homepage:
• Size: 8.76 MB
• Stars: 6
• Watchers: 9
• Forks: 2
• Open Issues: 14
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: readme.md
  • Contributing: .github/CONTRIBUTING.md
  • License: LICENSE
  • Code of conduct: code_of_conduct.md

Awesome Lists containing this project

README

        
# Walk

[![GoDoc](https://godoc.org/github.com/qri-io/walk?status.svg)](http://godoc.org/github.com/qri-io/walk) [![License](https://img.shields.io/github/license/qri-io/walk.svg?style=flat-square)](./LICENSE) [![Codecov](https://img.shields.io/codecov/c/github/qri-io/walk.svg?style=flat-square)](https://codecov.io/gh/qri-io/walk) [![CI](https://img.shields.io/circleci/project/github/qri-io/walk.svg?style=flat-square)](https://circleci.com/gh/qri-io/walk)

## What is this project?

Walk is a sitemapping tool. It's designed to crawl and snapshot sitemaps from URLs in order to understand how sites change over time.

**Current status:** Design & prototyping phase

**Key user:** EDGI web monitoring analysts, who want to understand changes in the structure of sites, and particularly look out for "islanding" (when a web resource still exists at a URL but is no longer linked to from anywhere)

**How to get involved:**

* Reach out over [Slack](https://archivers-slack.herokuapp.com/) or

* Make an issue on this repo to explain your interest or use case

---

## Building from source

To build Walk you'll need the [go programming language](https://golang.org) on your machine.

```shell

$ go get github.com/qri-io/walk

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/qri-io/walk

$ make install

```

---

## Architecture

### Minimum viable version

Walk is written as a library accessed through a command line interface (CLI). It takes a configuration file and returns a sitemap in NDJSON (newline-delimited JSON).

#### Basic architecture

There are two major components of Walk:

1. **Crawler**: takes a URL and spits out linked URLs

1. **Coordinator/result handler**: orchestrates and takes the output of crawls, maintains global state

The crawler crawls just one level (links from one particular page) at a time. The results are then sent to the coordinator/result handler, which performs some minimal processing (e.g. de-duplication of lists of returned URLs) and queues the next iterations of crawling.

![Diagram of the jobs, workers, and results interacting with the coordinator](https://i.imgur.com/oeyPp9m.png)

#### Interaction

Walk's coordinator runs on a cloud server in order to minimize potential disruption of a job.

Jobs can be queued to the server through a REST API (http) or through the `server` flag in the CLI.

### Set in a broader vision

Walk is a modular system of components. It begins as a crawler/sitemapper, building snapshots of URL links.

From that foundation, it should be able to grow into a web scraper (takes URL and gives list of resources mapped to content).

The grandest vision of Walk is a tool that can take in a BIG list of URLs (30k+), reliably snapshot both sitemaps and webpage resources, and export the results into a number of formats. It is intended as a shared resource for many projects.

System diagram:

![System Diagram](docs/system_diagram.jpg)

(Diagram notes: System components are in square-edged boxes, while the format of data being sent between them is in round-edged boxes. Open questions highlighted in green.)