README.md

Tarantula - A python based website crawler!

This a project to demonstrate the use of standard python libraries like os, urllib, HTMLParser to create a minimalist webpage crawler that crawls webpages on a website to gather hyperlinks (URLs)

Files in Project:

• general.py
  
• link_finder.py
  
• domain.py
  
• spider.py
  
• main.py

How to run:

Step 1: Make the necessary changes
Navigate to file main.py and change the following lines

• To create a new project
  PROJECT_NAME = 'TEST'
  Change the project name from TEST to YOUR_PROJECT_NAME
  
• To add the homepage URL
  HOMEPAGE = 'https://example.com/'
  Change the link from https://example.com/ to TARGET_WEBSITE_HOMEPAGE_LINK {make sure to use the format as http(s)://abc.xyz}
  
• To change number of workers (Threads)
  Change this variable NUMBER_OF_THREADS = 8 to YOUR_THREADS {Default is 8}
  

Step 2: Run the crawler

• Using Python 2:
  python main.py
• Using Python 3:
  python3 main.py

File Descriptions:

1. general.py - url

This file contains various supporting functions that we will be using for our website crawler

2. link_finder.py - url

This file contains various supporting parsing functions using 'HTMLParser' and 'urllib' python modules that we will be using for our website crawler

3. domain.py - url

This file acts as a helper by providing functions to get the domain name and sub-domain name

4. spider.py - url

The actual Spider class that performs all the webpage crawling functions

5. main.py - url

This is the main file that creates multiple threads and assigns jobs to these threads. This file also is the starting point of the project's execution