April 2013 - Starting version 4.0, Crawl-Anywhere becomes an open-source project. Current version is 4.0.0 release candidate

Stable version 3.0.x is still available at http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/

Introduction

Crawl Anywhere is mainly a web crawler. However, Crawl-Anywhere includes all components in order to build a vertical search engine.

Crawl Anywhere includes :

• a Web Crawler with a Web administration interface (http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/crawl-anywhere/)
• a document processing pipeline (http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/simple-pipeline/)
• a Solr indexer
• a Solr tags cloud analyzer
• a full featured and customizable Web search application (some search engines using Crawl-anywhere : http://www.hurisearch.org/ or http://www.searchamnesty.org/)

Project home page : http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/

A web crawler is a program that discovers and read all HTML pages or documents (HTML, PDF, Office, ...) on a web site in order for example to index these data and build a search engine (like google). Wikipedia provides a great description of what is a Web crawler : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler.

Support

• For a reproducible bug, use the Github issues features : https://github.com/bejean/crawl-anywhere/issues?state=open

• For questions or suggestions, use the Google forum : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/crawl-anywhere

Build distribution

Pre-requisites :

• Maven 3.0.0 or >
• Oracle Java 6 or >

Steps :

• Clone the this Github project or download the ZIP file (https://github.com/bejean/crawl-anywhere/archive/master.zip)

• Open a console in the root directory of the project

• Edit the build.sh file in order to define target directory

   export DISTRIB=/tmp/CA
  

• ./build.sh > build.log

Installation

Pre-requisites :

• Oracle Java 6 or >
• Tomcat 5.5 or >
• Apache 2.0 or >
• PHP 5.2.x or 5.3.x or 5.4.x
• MongoDB 64 bits 2.2 or >
• Solr 3.x or > (configuration files provided for Solr 4.3.0)

Steps :

• Either build (see above) or download a pre-built version (http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/download-crawl-anywhere/)
• Copy the build result or extract the downloaded archives into the installation directory (for instance "/opt/crawler")
• Follow instructions here : http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/installation/

Getting Started

See the User Manual at http://www.crawl-anywhere.com/getting-started/

History

• release 4.0.0-alpha-1 : April, 28 2013
• release 4.0.0-alpha-2 : May, 22 2013
• release 4.0.0-alpha-3 : June, 21 2013
• release 4.0.0-alpha-4 : June, 23 2013
• release 4.0.0-beta-1 : August, 6 2013
• release 4.0.0-release-candidate : October, 20 2013

Roadmap

• release 4.0.0 final : December 2013