darc - Darkweb Crawler Project

For any technical and/or maintenance information, please kindly refer to the Official Documentation.

NB: Starting from version 1.0.0, new features of the project will not be developed into this public repository. Only bugfix and security patches will be applied to the update and new releases.

darc is designed as a swiss army knife for darkweb crawling. It integrates requests to collect HTTP request and response information, such as cookies, header fields, etc. It also bundles selenium to provide a fully rendered web page and screenshot of such view.

The general process of darc can be described as following:

There are two types of workers:

• crawler -- runs the darc.crawl.crawler to provide a fresh view of a link and test its connectability
• loader -- run the darc.crawl.loader to provide an in-depth view of a link and provide more visual information

The general process can be described as following for workers of crawler type:

1. darc.process.process_crawler: obtain URLs from the requests link database (c.f. darc.db.load_requests), and feed such URLs to darc.crawl.crawler.

   NOTE:

   If darc.const.FLAG_MP is True, the function will be called with multiprocessing support; if darc.const.FLAG_TH if True, the function will be called with multithreading support; if none, the function will be called in single-threading.

2. darc.crawl.crawler: parse the URL using darc.link.parse_link, and check if need to crawl the URL (c.f. darc.const.PROXY_WHITE_LIST, darc.const.PROXY_BLACK_LIST, darc.const.LINK_WHITE_LIST and darc.const.LINK_BLACK_LIST); if true, then crawl the URL with requests.

   If the URL is from a brand new host, darc will first try to fetch and save robots.txt and sitemaps of the host (c.f. darc.proxy.null.save_robots and darc.proxy.null.save_sitemap), and extract then save the links from sitemaps (c.f. darc.proxy.null.read_sitemap) into link database for future crawling (c.f. darc.db.save_requests). Also, if the submission API is provided, darc.submit.submit_new_host will be called and submit the documents just fetched.

   If robots.txt presented, and darc.const.FORCE is False, darc will check if allowed to crawl the URL.

   NOTE:

   The root path (e.g. / in https://www.example.com/) will always be crawled ignoring robots.txt.

   At this point, darc will call the customised hook function from darc.sites to crawl and get the final response object. darc will save the session cookies and header information, using darc.save.save_headers.

   NOTE:

   If requests.exceptions.InvalidSchema is raised, the link will be saved by darc.proxy.null.save_invalid. Further processing is dropped.

   If the content type of response document is not ignored (c.f. darc.const.MIME_WHITE_LIST and darc.const.MIME_BLACK_LIST), darc.submit.submit_requests will be called and submit the document just fetched.

   If the response document is HTML (text/html and application/xhtml+xml), darc.parse.extract_links will be called then to extract all possible links from the HTML document and save such links into the database (c.f. darc.db.save_requests).

   And if the response status code is between 400 and 600, the URL will be saved back to the link database (c.f. darc.db.save_requests). If NOT, the URL will be saved into selenium link database to proceed next steps (c.f. darc.db.save_selenium).

The general process can be described as following for workers of loader type:

1. darc.process.process_loader: in the meanwhile, darc will obtain URLs from the selenium link database (c.f. darc.db.load_selenium), and feed such URLs to darc.crawl.loader.

   NOTE:

   If darc.const.FLAG_MP is True, the function will be called with multiprocessing support; if darc.const.FLAG_TH if True, the function will be called with multithreading support; if none, the function will be called in single-threading.

2. darc.crawl.loader: parse the URL using darc.link.parse_link and start loading the URL using selenium with Google Chrome.

   At this point, darc will call the customised hook function from darc.sites to load and return the original selenium.webdriver.chrome.webdriver.WebDriver object.

   If successful, the rendered source HTML document will be saved, and a full-page screenshot will be taken and saved.

   If the submission API is provided, darc.submit.submit_selenium will be called and submit the document just loaded.

   Later, darc.parse.extract_links will be called then to extract all possible links from the HTML document and save such links into the requests database (c.f. darc.db.save_requests).

Installation

NOTE:

darc supports Python all versions above and includes 3.6. Currently, it only supports and is tested on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04) and macOS (Catalina).

When installing in Python versions below 3.8, darc will use walrus to compile itself for backport compatibility.

pip install python-darc

Please make sure you have Google Chrome and corresponding version of Chrome Driver installed on your system.

Starting from version 0.3.0, we introduced Redis for the task queue database backend.

Since version 0.6.0, we introduced relationship database storage (e.g. MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, etc.) for the task queue database backend, besides the Redis database, since it can be too much memory-costly when the task queue becomes vary large.

Please make sure you have one of the backend database installed, configured, and running when using the darc project.

However, the darc project is shipped with Docker and Compose support. Please see the project root for relevant files and more information.

Or, you may refer to and/or install from the Docker Hub repository:

docker pull jsnbzh/darc[:TAGNAME]

or GitHub Container Registry, with more updated and comprehensive images:

docker pull ghcr.io/jarryshaw/darc[:TAGNAME]
# or the debug image
docker pull ghcr.io/jarryshaw/darc-debug[:TAGNAME]

Usage

The darc project provides a simple CLI:

usage: darc [-h] [-v] -t {crawler,loader} [-f FILE] ...

the darkweb crawling swiss army knife

positional arguments:
  link                  links to craw

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --version         show program's version number and exit
  -t {crawler,loader}, --type {crawler,loader}
                        type of worker process
  -f FILE, --file FILE  read links from file

It can also be called through module entrypoint:

python -m darc ...

NOTE:

The link files can contain comment lines, which should start with #. Empty lines and comment lines will be ignored when loading.