Crowlet is a sitemap.xml crawler, that can be used as cache warmer, or as a monitoring tool. When ran, it will report information relative to the crawling. Uses include:
- Manual website health check
- Website status and response time monitoring
- Periodic warm up of a server's cache
The simplest option is to run the tool from its docker image aleravat/crowlet. It can otherwise be used from command line as crowlet.
Run the sitemap crawler from its docker image directly
docker run -it --rm aleravat/crowlet https://foo.bar/sitemap.xml
Or build locally with make build and run.
You can alternatively use make build-static-linux to build a self contained binary for Linux platforms.
make build
./crowlet https://foo.bar/sitemap.xml
Crowlet can be used in a few different ways, as described below.
Ran once on a sitemap, it will provide information regarding return codes and complete server time.
crowlet https://google.com/sitemap.xml
INFO[0000] Crawling https://google.com/sitemap.xml
INFO[0020] Found 5010 URL(s)
INFO[0020] URL: https://www.google.com/intl/ar/gmail/about/for-work/ status=200 total-time=85
INFO[0020] URL: https://www.google.com/intl/ar/gmail/about/ status=200 total-time=86
INFO[0020] URL: https://www.google.com/intl/am/gmail/about/for-work/ status=200 total-time=87
INFO[0020] URL: https://www.google.com/intl/am/gmail/about/policy/ status=200 total-time=87
INFO[0020] URL: https://www.google.com/intl/am/gmail/about/ status=200 total-time=88
[...]
INFO[0021] -------- Summary -------
INFO[0021] general:
INFO[0021] crawled: 51
INFO[0021]
INFO[0021] status:
INFO[0021] status-200: 51
INFO[0021]
INFO[0021] server-time:
INFO[0021] avg-time: 61ms
INFO[0021] max-time: 145ms
INFO[0021] ------------------------
You can use this tool as to warm cache for all URLs in a sitemap using the --forever option. This will keep crawling the sitemap forever, and --wait-interval can be used to define the pause duration in seconds, between each complete crawling.
# Crawl the sitemap every 30 minutes
$ docker run -it --rm aleravat/crowlet --forever --wait-interval 1800 https://foo.bar/sitemap.xmlIf any page from the sitemap returns a non 200 status code, crowlet will return with exit code 1. This can be used and customized to monitor the status of the pages, and automate error detection. The --non-200-error option allow setting the exit code if any page has a non 200 status code.
# Return with code `150` if any page has a status != 200
docker run -it --rm aleravat/crowlet --non-200-error 150 https://foo.bar/sitemap.xmlThe --json flag can be used, as well as --summary-only for an easy parsing of the output.
./crowlet --json --summary-only https://google.com/sitemap.xml
{"total":{"crawled":43},"status":{"status-codes":{"200":43},"errors":null},"response-time":{"avg-time-ms":87,"max-time-ms":418}}
The --crawl-images, --crawl-hyperlinks and --crawl-external options can be used to extends the monitoring to internal (or even external) links found in the original sitemap pages. Their statistics will be added to the final report.
The --response-time-max option can be used to indicate a maximum server total time, or crowlet will return with --response-time-error return code. Note that if any page return a status code different from 200, the --non-200-error code will be returned instead.
# Return with code `5` if any page takes more than `1000`ms until reception
# -t 1: Load pages one by one to avoid biased measurement
docker run -it --rm aleravat/crowlet -t 1 -l 5 -m 1000 https://foo.bar/sitemap.xmlThe following arguments can be used to customize it to your needs:
COMMANDS:
help, h Shows a list of commands or help for one command
GLOBAL OPTIONS:
--crawl-hyperlinks follow and test hyperlinks ('a' tags href)
--crawl-images follow and test image links ('img' tags src)
--crawl-external follow and test external links. Use in combination with 'follow-hyperlinks' and/or 'follow-images'
--forever, -f crawl the sitemap's URLs forever... or until stopped
--iterations value, -i value number of crawling iterations for the whole sitemap (default: 1)
--wait-interval value, -w value wait interval in seconds between sitemap crawling iterations (default: 0) [$CRAWL_WAIT_INTERVAL]
--throttle value, -t value number of http requests to do at once (default: 5) [$CRAWL_THROTTLE]
--timeout value, -y value timeout duration for requests, in milliseconds (default: 20000)
--quiet, --silent, -q suppress all normal output
--json, -j output using JSON format (experimental)
--non-200-error value, -e value error code to use if any non-200 response if encountered (default: 1)
--response-time-error value, -l value error code to use if the maximum response time is overrun (default: 1)
--response-time-max value, -m value maximum response time of URLs, in milliseconds, before considered an error (default: 0)
--summary-only print only the summary
--override-host value override the hostname used in sitemap urls [$CRAWL_HOST]
--user value, -u value username for http basic authentication [$CRAWL_HTTP_USER]
--pass value, -p value password for http basic authentication [$CRAWL_HTTP_PASSWORD]
--pre-cmd value command(s) to run before starting crawler
--post-cmd value command(s) to run after crawler finishes
--debug run in debug mode
--help, -h show help
--version, -v print the version
This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License- see the LICENSE.md file for details
Thanks to @chris-scentregroup for his great initial work with sitemap-crawler