TechCrawler

Crawl a list of domains and attempt to detect technologies used.

TechCrawler uses a plugin system, located in lib/tech_crawler/plugins, where each plugin must respond to #call and return a boolean whether a particular technology was detected.

TechCrawler attempts to detect as many technolgies as possible on the first request to the root path of the domain, ex. google.com. For a given domain this will generate at most 1 HTTP request for N plugins.

If a technology is not detected on the root path of the domain, an additional request is generated for each plugin that responds to #path, generating at most 1 request per plugin/path.

Technical notes and caveats

• HTTP request configuration is located in lib/tech_crawler/configuration.rb with the following defaults:

• Request gzip encoding of responses
• Accept cookies
• A Firefox user-agent header which may run afoul of proper scraping etiquette.

• max_concurrency is currently hard-coded at 20 in lib/tech_crawler/crawler.rb. Things will get flakey if you try to make too many requests at the same time. The built in limit is 200.
• Unit tests for each plugin are located in spec/plugins
• Integration tests for each plugin are located in spec/crawler

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'tech_crawler'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install tech_crawler

Usage

Usage: crawl [options]
        --size [SIZE]                Select crawl size (10, 50, 1k, 1M)
    -h, --help                       Prints this help

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/bds/tech_crawler. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.