Heritrix

Heritrix

Heritrix is an open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project built on the Apache stack. It is designed for archiving periodic captures of content from the web and large intranets.
Heritrix image
archiving web-crawler open-source

Heritrix: Open-Source Web Crawler

An open-source, extensible web crawler project built on Apache stack for archiving periodic captures of content from the web and large intranets.

What is Heritrix?

Heritrix is an open-source web crawler software project that was originally developed by the Internet Archive. It is designed to systematically browse and archive web pages by recursively following hyperlinks and storing the content in the WARC file format.

Some key features of Heritrix include:

  • Extensible and modular architecture based on Apache standards to support customization
  • Respects robots.txt and other directives to avoid overloading servers
  • Supports metadata extraction, post-processing of archived data, recovery from errors
  • Distributed architecture for high performance, scalability and robustness
  • Advanced configuration for in-depth crawling jobs targeting specific parts of websites

Heritrix is well-suited for building specialty search engine indexes, archiving online content for preservation purposes, and offline browsing of websites. Its focused crawling features allow users to customize crawl scopes and avoid unrelated content.

While Heritrix excels at archival-quality crawls, it has higher overhead than some other crawler software. It prioritizes quality, completeness and politeness over crawling speed. Heritrix is typically run on powerful servers and can handle complex, large-scale web crawling projects.

Heritrix Features

Features

  1. Crawls websites to archive web pages
  2. Extensible and customizable architecture
  3. Respects robots.txt and other exclusion rules
  4. Handles large-scale web crawling
  5. Supports distributed crawling across multiple machines
  6. Recovers from crashes and network problems
  7. Provides APIs and web interface for managing crawls

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Open source and free

High performance and scalability

Robust architecture and recovery features

Wide adoption for web archiving

Customizable to specific needs

APIs allow integration into workflows

Cons

Complex installation and configuration

Steep learning curve

Requires expertise to customize and extend

Not ideal for focused or targeted crawling

No official technical support services


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