crawl-anywhere icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
crawl-anywhere copied to clipboard

Crawl-Anywhere - Web Crawler and document processing pipeline with Solr integration.

Crawl-Anywhere

April 2013 - Starting version 4.0, Crawl-Anywhere becomes an open-source project. Current version is 4.0.0

Stable version 3.0.x is still available at http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/

Introduction

Crawl Anywhere is mainly a web crawler. However, Crawl-Anywhere includes all components in order to build a vertical search engine.

Crawl Anywhere includes :

  • a Web Crawler with a Web administration interface (http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/crawl-anywhere/)
  • a document processing pipeline (http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/simple-pipeline/)
  • a Solr indexer
  • a Solr tags cloud analyzer
  • a full featured and customizable Web search application (some search engines using Crawl-anywhere : http://www.hurisearch.org/ or http://www.searchamnesty.org/)

Project home page : http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/

A web crawler is a program that discovers and read all HTML pages or documents (HTML, PDF, Office, ...) on a web site in order for example to index these data and build a search engine (like google). Wikipedia provides a great description of what is a Web crawler : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler.

Support

  • For a reproducible bug, use the Github issues features : https://github.com/bejean/crawl-anywhere/issues?state=open

  • For questions or suggestions, use the Google forum : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/crawl-anywhere

Build distribution

Pre-requisites :

  • Maven 3.0.0 or >
  • Oracle Java 7 or >

Steps :

  • Clone the this Github project or download the ZIP file (https://github.com/bejean/crawl-anywhere/archive/master.zip)

  • Open a console in the root directory of the project

  • Edit the build.sh file in order to define target directory

     export DISTRIB=/tmp/CA
    
  • ./build.sh > build.log

Installation

Pre-requisites :

  • Oracle Java 7 or >
  • Apache 2.0 or >
  • PHP 5.2.x or 5.3.x or 5.4.x
  • MongoDB 64 bits 2.2 or >
  • Solr 4.3.0 or > (configuration files provided for Solr 4.3.0 and 4.10.0)

Steps :

  • Either build (see above) or download a pre-built version (http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/download-crawl-anywhere/)
  • Copy the build result or extract the downloaded archives into the installation directory (for instance "/opt/crawler")
  • Follow instructions here : http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/installation/

Getting Started

See the User Manual at http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/getting-started/

History

  • release 4.0.0-alpha-1 : April, 28 2013
  • release 4.0.0-alpha-2 : May, 22 2013
  • release 4.0.0-alpha-3 : June, 21 2013
  • release 4.0.0-alpha-4 : June, 23 2013
  • release 4.0.0-beta-1 : August, 6 2013
  • release 4.0.0-release-candidate : October, 20 2013
  • release 4.0.0 final : December, 1, 2014