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YAML Crawl Config

Browsertix Crawler supports the use of a YAML file to set parameters for a crawl. This can be used by passing a valid yaml file to the --config option.

The YAML file can contain the same parameters as the command-line arguments. If a parameter is set on the command-line and in the YAML file, the value from the command-line will be used. For example, the following should start a crawl with config in crawl-config.yaml.

docker run -v $PWD/crawl-config.yaml:/app/crawl-config.yaml -v $PWD/crawls:/crawls/ webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler crawl --config /app/crawl-config.yaml

The config can also be passed via stdin, which can simplify the command. Note that this require running docker run with the -i flag. To read config from stdin, pass --config stdin

cat ./crawl-config.yaml | docker run -i -v $PWD/crawls:/crawls/ webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler crawl --config stdin

An example config file (eg. crawl-config.yaml) might contain:

seeds:
  - https://example.com/
  - https://www.iana.org/

combineWARC: true

The list of seeds can be loaded via an external file by specifying the filename via the seedFile config or command-line option.

Seed File

The URL seed file should be a text file formatted so that each line of the file is a url string. An example file is available in the Github repository's fixture folder as urlSeedFile.txt.

The seed file must be passed as a volume to the docker container. Your Docker command should be formatted similar to the following:

docker run -v $PWD/seedFile.txt:/app/seedFile.txt -v $PWD/crawls:/crawls/ webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler crawl --seedFile /app/seedFile.txt

Per-Seed Settings

Certain settings such as scope type, scope includes and excludes, and depth can also be configured per-seed directly in the YAML file, for example:

seeds:
  - url: https://webrecorder.net/
    depth: 1
    scopeType: "prefix"