talltyler/node-crawler

Web Crawler/Spider for NodeJS + server-side jQuery ;-)

node-crawler

How to install

$ npm install crawler

How to test

$ node test/simple.js
$ node test/testrunner.js

Why / What ?

For now just check my lightning talk slides

Help & Forks welcomed! This is just starting for now.

Rough todolist :

• Make Sizzle tests pass (jsdom bug? https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom/issues#issue/81)
• More crawling tests
• Document the API
• Get feedback on featureset for a 1.0 release (option for autofollowing links?)
• Check how we can support other mimetypes than HTML
• Add+test timeout parameter
• Option to wait for callback to finish before freeing the pool resource (via another callback like next())
• Events on queue empty / full

API

var Crawler = require("node-crawler").Crawler;

var c = new Crawler({
    "maxConnections":10,
    "callback":function(error,result,$) {
        $("#content a:link").each(function(a) {
            c.queue(a.href);
        })
    }
});

// Queue a list of URLs, with default callback
c.queue(["http://jamendo.com/","http://tedxparis.com", ...]);

// Queue URLs with custom callbacks
c.queue([{
    "uri":"http://parisjs.org/register",
    "method":"POST",
    "callback":function(error,result,$) {
        $("div:contains(Thank you)").after(" very much");
    }
}]);

// Queue some HTML code directly without grabbing (mostly for tests)
c.queue([{
    "html":"<p>This is a <strong>test</strong></p>"
}]);

ChangeLog

0.1.0

• Updated dependencies, notably node 0.4.x
• Fixes jQuery being redownloaded at each page + include it in the tree
• Cache support
• Retries
• Updated priority support with new generic-pool>=1.0.4