URL Crawler

Merlin comes with a URL crawler to help generate URL lists prior to a migration.

URL Grouping

Merlin can assist in grouping URLs by specifying grouping options in the crawler config. This is useful to crawl an entire website and generate separate lists of URLs based on a set of criteria (either regex, or selectors in the DOM).

All groupings should have an id key as this will be used to key the result set.

Available types

Path

Group URLs based on their path. This grouping method allows you to specify wildcard path patterns to match certain groups. You can use one or more patterns when defining this rule. The matching method allows wildcard (*) in the URL, this can be used to match the whole path or parts in the path.

type: path
options:
  pattern: /single-pattern
  # pattern:
  #    - /multiple-patterns/*
  #    - /works/*/with/wildcards/*/in/pattern

Element

Group URLs by the existence of a DOM element. The selector option can be a valid CSS selector or Xpath selector.

type: element
options:
  selector: //*/h1

Value

Group URLs by the value of a given element or attribute. If the attribute key is not present it will use the text value of DOM node when doing the comparison. Pattern can be a simple string or a valid regular expression.

type: value
options:
  selector: //*/h1
  pattern: /\w+{4}/
  attribute: data-type

Meta tag

Group URLs by the value of a given meta tag.

type: meta
options:
  attr: name
  value: contenttype
  content: 
    - 'Landing page'
    - 'Standard page'

Configuration example

---
domain: https://example.com/
entity_type: standard_page

options:
  follow_redirects: true  # Allow internal redirects.
  ignore_robotstxt: true  # Ignore robots.txt rules around crawlability.
  maximum_total: 0        # Optionally restrict total number of crawled URLs.
  concurrency: 10         # Restrict concurrent crawlers.
  rewrite_domain: true    # Standardises base domain.
  delay: 100              # Pause between requests in ms.
  exclude: []             # Optional regex matches to exclude (url results).
  include: []             # Optional regex matches to include (url results).
  crawler_exclude: []     # Optional regex matches to exclude (do not follow).
  crawler_include: []     # Optional regex matches to include (only follow).
  path_only: true         # Return only the path from the crawled URL.

  # Optionally provide one or more URLs as the starting point. This can be provided
  # as a string or an array.
  urls:                   
    - /sports/cricket
  
  # Group options to allow segmenting URLs based on some business rules.
  group_by: []             
  
  # Caches crawled content and uses cache to build results.
  cache_enabled: true     
 
  # Generates a list of urls containing duplicate content.  Only the first
  # crawled duplicate will appear in the crawled url or grouped url results. 
  find_content_duplicates: true   

Simply provide a configuration input file and output folder for generated assets and run with:

php migrate crawl -c /path/to/config.yml -o /path/to/output

You will see output as follows:

===================
Preparing the configuration
---------------------------

Setting concurrency to 10

 [OK] Starting crawl!

https://example.com/
https://example.com/sports/cricket
https://example.com/sports/basketball
https://example.com/sports/baseball
https://example.com/products/classic-teamwear
https://example.com/sports/afl
https://example.com/sports
https://example.com/products
... etc

 [ERROR] Error: https://example.com/design -- Found on url: https://example.com/

 [OK] Done!
 [OK] 432 total URLs.

Generating files
----------------

Generating /tmp/crawled-urls.yml Done!
Generating /tmp/crawl-error.yml Done!

 [OK] Done!

Completed in 29.005132913589

Flag Options

Flag	Full Name	Description	Default
-c	--config	Path to the configuration file
-o	--output	Path to the output directory	__DIR__
-d	--debug	Output debug messages	false
-l	--limit	Limit the max number of items to crawl (overrides the maximum_total config option if specified)	0 (Crawl all items)
	--concurrency	Number of requests to make in parallel	10
	--no-cache	Run without cache	false (Cache enabled)