🕸️Gumo

"Gumo" (蜘蛛) is Japanese for "spider".

Overview 👓

A web-crawler (get it?) and scraper that extracts data from a family of nested dynamic webpages with added enhancements to assist in knowledge mining applications. Written in NodeJS.

Table of Contents 📖

• 🕸️Gumo
  • Overview 👓
  • Table of Contents 📖
  • Features 🌟
  • Installation 🏗️
  • Usage 👨‍💻
  • Configuration ⚙️
  • ElasticSearch ⚡
  • GraphDB ☋
    • Nodes
    • Relationships
  • TODO ☑️

Features 🌟

• Crawl hyperlinks present on the pages of any domain and its subdomains.
• Scrape meta-tags and body text from every page.
• Store entire sitemap in a GraphDB (currently supports Neo4J).
• Store page content in ElasticSearch for easy full-text lookup.

Installation 🏗️

Usage 👨‍💻

From code:

// 1: import the module
const gumo = require('gumo')

// 2: instantiate the crawler
let cron = new gumo()

// 3: call the configure method and pass the configuration options
cron.configure({
    'neo4j': { // replace with your details or remove if not required
        'url' : 'neo4j://localhost',
        'user' : 'neo4j',
        'password' : 'gumo123'
    },
    'elastic': { // replace with your details or remove if not required
        'url' : 'http://localhost:9200',
        'index' : 'myIndex'
    },
    'crawler': {
        'url': 'https://www.example.com',
    }
});

// 4: start crawling
cron.insert()

Note: The config params passed to cron.configure above are the default values. Please refer to the Configuration section below to learn more about the customization options that are available.

Configuration ⚙️

The behavior of the crawler can be customized by passing a custom configuration object to the config() method. The following are the attributes which can be configured:

| Attribute ( * - Mandatory ) | Type | Accepted Values | Description | Default Value | Default Behavior | | :---------------------------- | :------------ | :--------------- | :----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | :---------------------- | :----------------------------------------------------------------------- | | * crawler.url | string | | Base URL to start scanning from | "" (empty string) | Module is disabled | | | crawler.Cookie | string | | Cookie string to be sent with each request (useful for pages that require auth) | "" (empty string) | Cookies will not be attached to the requests | | crawler.saveOutputAsHtml | string | "Yes"/"No" | Whether or not to store scraped content as HTML files in the output/html/ directory | "No" | Saving output as HTML files is disabled | | crawler.saveOutputAsJson | string | "Yes"/"No" | Whether or not to store scraped content as JSON files in the output/json/ directory | "No" | Saving output as JSON files is disabled | | crawler.maxRequestsPerSecond | int | range: 1 to 5000 | The maximum number of requests to be sent to the target in one second | 5000 | | | crawler.maxConcurrentRequests | int | range: 1 to 5000 | The maximum number of concurrent connections to be created with the host at any given time | 5000 | | | crawler.whiteList | Array(string) | | If populated, only these URLs will be traversed | [] (empty array) | All URLs with the same hostname as the "url" attribute will be traversed | | crawler.blackList | Array(string) | | If populated, these URLs will ignored | [] (empty array) | | | crawler.depth | int | range: 1 to 999 | Depth up to which nested hyperlinks will be followed | 3 | | | * elastic.url | string | | URI of the ElasticSearch instance to connect to | "http://localhost:9200" | | | * elastic.index | string | | The name of the ElasticSearch index to store results in | "myIndex" | | | * neo4j.url | string | | The URI of a running Neo4J instance (uses the Bolt driver to connect) | "neo4j://localhost" | | | * neo4j.user | string | | Neo4J server username | "neo4j" | | | * neo4j.password | string | | Neo4J server password | "gumo123" | |

ElasticSearch ⚡

The content of the web page will be stored along with the url, and a hash. The index for the elastic search can be selected through config.json index attribute. If the index already exists in the elastic search it will be used, else it will create one.

id: hash, index: config.index, type: 'pages', body: JSON.stringify(page content)

GraphDB ☋

The sitemap of all the traversed pages is stored in a convenient graph. The following structure of nodes and relationships is followed:

Nodes

• Label: Page
• Properties:

| Property Name | Type | Description | | :------------ | :----- | :---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | pid | String | UID generated by the crawler which can be used to uniquely identify a page across ElasticSearch and GraphDB | | link | String | URL of the current page | | parent | String | URL of the page from which the current page was accessed (typically only used while creating relationships) | | title | String | Page title as it appears in the page header |

Relationships

| Name | Direction | Condition | | :--------- | :----------------------- | :---------------- | | links_to | (a)-[r1:links_to]->(b) | b.link = a.parent | | links_from | (b)-[r2:links_from]->(a) | b.link = a.parent |

TODO ☑️

• [ ] Make it executable from CLI
• [x] Enable to send config parameters while invoking the gumo
• [ ] Write more tests