README.md

Aragog

Aragog is a web crawler built to scrape all of the urls from www.thomann.de. While there are some aspects which are specific to that domain, the main feature which stops it being a general web crawling solution for arbitrary domain is the parser I built to handle the robots.txt. This is somewhat optimised for thomann.de. For example, we assume that 'we' (i.e. whoever is deploying the Aragog parser) are not famous enough to have specific user-agent rules. The crawler was written in such a way that all of the robots.txt parsing logic is built into a mixin which could be switched out in a straight forward way so that this can be fixed later.

Assumptions

I'm working under the following assumptions here:

• We can't DOS the target site!!! For this reason I'm throttling the request rate to 2 per second
• We aren't a famous user-agent (see above)
• That the requirement "...write a web crawler that will extract all the URLs from a website..." means: catalogue every url linked to from the www.thomann.de domain, but only follow urls which point to another page at the same domain. This means we will stop crawling after we have all local domains, but that we will still keep track of all non-local urls referenced from www.thomann.de. I think this is in the spirit of the goal, which is to "write a web crawler that will extract all the URLs from a website so that they could later be scraped for product data".
• For a first pass, concurrency == over-engineering. This might be controversial. However, in the prototyping phase I found that the time taken to perform a request, parse the DOM, and extract all urls was around 400ms on average. There is a large variance (e.g. the homepage has a lot of links, and took around 900ms). Given that we spend <500ms waiting on I/O (on average) and that our goal is throttle the request rate at 2 per second anyway, concurrency is probably not a top priority for a fist pass at this problem
• A url can have the form base[?query][#fragment], the query and fragment do not necessarily define a unique page. queries could indeed lead to a set of pages which are trivially different, and this set could be arbitrarily large! Nevertheless, the problem statement asks for the full set of urls, so we include them.

TODO

• Write an arbitrary robots.txt parser (I think I'm probably not that far off to be honest, but my unit tests were written with the target domain in the back of my mind, so I'm potentially missing some things necessary for generality)
• Build in concurrency (might have been a bit much for a first pass at the project, but 50ms here and there would really add up if I were crawling www.amazon.com instead of www.thomann.de!!!!). I'd potentially want this to be achieved with multiprocessing, so I could split the requests, parsing, queuing and storage into different microservices. This would be better for scalability if one of these constituents is less performant than the others, for example.
• Think more carefully about queuing/stacking the urls. I've implemented a pretty naive approach where I add un-clicked urls to a set and just pop from that set for as long as it's non-empty. This isn't a great way to traverse a graph, but should do fine for a first pass. Ideally we'd want to use a priority queue which prioritizes paths according to their distance from root. Then we can implement depth-first-search on top of that. It seems like the root is going to contain a large number of urls and that the further from root we get the more specific pages are going to get. If this intuition is correct, we can minimize the number of requests (the main constraint on performance!!!) by implementing a priority queue with a distance-from-root metric. As a heuristic I'm guessing that would be a nice approach at a general solution.
• I just realised urllib.robotparser ships with the python standard library. Oops...

Set up:

Clone the repo

[you@localhost: ~]$ git clone git clone https://github.com/LachlanMarnham/Aragog.git
...
[you@localhost: ~]$ cd Aragog

Create a virtual environment, e.g....

[you@localhost: Aragog]$ virtualenv --python=python3.6 venv

... and activate it...

[you@localhost: Aragog]$ source venv/bin/activate

... and install the packages into it

(venv) [you@localhost: Aragog]$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the code

To run the code against the default domain and schema (https://www.thomann.de/):

(venv) [you@localhost: Aragog]$ cd app
(venv) [you@localhost: app]$ python run_aragog.py

This is the only domain that I've tested in detail, but in principle a suitably time-wealthy user could run:

(venv) [you@localhost: app]$ python run_aragog.py --schema https:// --domain www.amazon.com/

To generate the images used in the gif (see below), run:

(venv) [you@localhost: app]$ python run_aragog.py --plot_output

One can get help in the usual way:

(venv) [you@localhost: app]$ python run_aragog.py --help

Run the tests

(venv) [you@localhost: app]$ cd ../tests
(venv) [you@localhost: tests]$ py.test

Bonus gif

Running the code with the --plot_output flag set (see above) instantiates a NetworkGraphHandler. This maintains a graph of our website, where nodes represent the pages Aragog has scraped and edges represent the links between them. After the graph has been updated N times, it creates a figure and saves it as ./figures/*.png. The number of figures very quickly spirals out of control, so I chose N=25 to minimize the updates. Currently the NetworkGraphHandler, adds every node it finds. The result is a quickly-saturated plot which lacks interesting internal structure. If we only added those nodes at the target domain it would be much more interesting... ... Anyway, here's the result: